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Witnessing silence: testimony, performance, and the poetics of the unspeakable

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Witnessing silence: testimony, performance, and the poetics of the unspeakable

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Content 1
WITNESSING SILENCE:
TESTIMONY, PERFORMANCE, AND THE POETICS OF THE
UNSPEAKABLE

by

Erin Mizrahi

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE & CULTURE)

December 2018

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………….3

Preface: In the Shadow of No Archive……………………………………………..4

Introduction: Toward a Phenomenology of Silence………………………………...8

Chapter 1: In Search of Silence……………………………………………………21

Chapter 2: Performing on the Edge of Silence…………………………………….34

Chapter 3: Testimonial Silence…………………………………………………….74

Chapter 4: The Rememory of Words…………………………………………….100

Chapter 5: The Survival of Survival……………………………………………...130

Conclusion: In an Archive of Shadows………………………………………….168

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………..181

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Acknowledgments

My work is very much indebted to my dream team committee. I have been fortunate
to work with these brilliant and inspiring thinkers since the beginning of my
doctorate. Akira Lippit who I had read long before I had the privilege of working
with. Inspired in advance, I am forever grateful for your insight and guidance
throughout this project and its many iterations along the way. Panivong Norindr
whose questions and generous feedback have been so critical to this project. I am
grateful for your support and your reading, always. Anna Krakus, whose insight,
mentorship, and support have been invaluable. Thank you for all of this and more.

To the department of CSLC and to all of my colleagues, especially Guillermo
Rodriguez, Viola Lasmana, Kristen Besinque, and April Hovav for their support and
feedback throughout this journey.

My work has benefited from many brilliant readers, teachers, and interlocutors
including Alice Gambrell, Julian Guiterrez-Albilla, Allen Feldman, Veli Yashin, Tara
McPherson, Erin Graff-Zivin, Jack Halberstam, and Peggy Kamuf.

To the inspiring 2018 ACLA Seminar “Impossible Recollections” organized by Maya
Larson and Ahmad Nadalizadeh where I received invaluable feedback on my last
chapter, “The Survival of Survival.” I am thankful to all of the seminar participants;
Laurie Johnson, Irene Yoon-Milner, Josefina Lundblad-Janjic, and Jennifer Olive for
their generous feedback and encouragement.

My research has been made possible from generous funding by USC’s Final Year
Fellowship and The Shoah Foundation’s Summer Research Fellowship. I’m grateful
to Wolf Gruner and the Center for Advanced Genocide Research (CAGR) at the
Shoah Foundation for awarding me a research fellowship which was invaluable for
this project to emerge. Thank you for believing in my work. The team at CAGR
offered more help than I can begin to list here, Emilie Garrigou-Kempton, Shefali
Deshpande, and especially Martha Stroud for our many discussions about silence and
gesture in the archives. Thank you to Scott Spencer, Sandra Gruner-Domic, Crispin
Brooks, and Ita Gordon for scouring the archives with me in search of silence and
for witnessing testimony together. Thank you to Kia Hays who brought me on to the
New Dimensions in Testimony Project. I am grateful for all of your help and your
friendship.

To my partner, Eitan Arom, for all the days and all the nights spent writing in the
desert of Joshua Tree. This work is indebted to your careful reading, listening, and
editing.

My deepest gratitude is to my parents for everything. This text is for you.

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In the Shadow of No Archive

I am investigating the possibility that something substantial can be made from the
outline left after the body has disappeared. My hunch is that the affective outline of
what we’ve lost might bring us closer to the bodies we want still to touch than the
restored illustration can. Or the hollow outlines might allow us to understand more
deeply why we long to hold bodies that are gone
–Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex (3)

I remember the first time I felt the impulse to archive, to preserve something
that was disappearing before my eyes.
Maus was required reading at my Jewish high school, which took “never
forget” to heart. For me, it was a rupture, the first time I felt disoriented with a
subject, and yet strangely close to it. So when Art Spiegelman visited Santa Cruz in
2004, I was eager for the chance to meet him. He was on a book tour for In the
Shadow of No Towers, a graphic novel and personal account of 9/11. Like Maus, In the
Shadow of No Towers was a personal text on the violence of memory, rupture, and ash.
His books are a new way of seeing, a new way of remembering, their own traumatic
and fractured archive.
Spiegelman is a notorious chain-smoker who insists on smoking while
reading, while speaking, while signing. UC Santa Cruz had no smoking facilities for
speakers, so his reading took place off-campus, at Bookshop Santa Cruz in
downtown. After his talk, I purchased a copy of In the Shadow of No Towers, and as he
signed my copy, he scattered cigarette ash all over the cover. I remember thinking
that the ash was the real signature, not the ink on the page; the ash was Art
Spiegelman writing his name. I carefully carried my book home, doing my best not to
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drop any of the still hot ash, fearful of any gust of wind, any bump from a passerby.
When I got home, I set the book down on my desk and applied decoupage glue to
the ash so that it might remain. This was my first venture into memory-work, into
trauma studies, obsessing over ash and searching for a body that was no longer there,
the disappeared and disappearing body.
Spiegelman was there in New York for 9/11, an event with a date as a name,
a name for a date, an event that is itself covered in ash, reduced to ash even. In a
sense, he was signing for those who perished. September 11, 2001, happened to be
the day that my family emerged from sitting shiva for my grandfather, who escaped
Rhodes before its remaining Jews were sent to Auschwitz. I remember arriving at my
grandparents’ home to complete the final rite of shiva: to exit the house and circle
the block, emerging into the world of the living and leaving the world of the dead
and mourning behind. But the backdrop of this scene was a large-screen television
displaying two burning towers. What world of the living was this? There was
mourning in every direction, ash everywhere, in the past we escaped, in the present
and surely too, in the future.
Of course, I wasn’t thinking any of this when I carried my ash-covered book
home, my book that was about cinders. I lost much of the ash, although some
remained. I offered to show people my signed book; they would look at his signature
and I would say, “No, there is his signature,” pointing to the ash below, a shadow
signature. This was my first act as witness to ash, and I was careless, rushing to
memorialize, to archive the ash. I went from witnessing to archiving, as though it
were predetermined, as though my bodily memory knew what to do and was
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prepared for this, a caretaker of cinders. Call it post-memory, call it intergenerational
trauma, call it a Jewish school education, whatever it was, I was performing a ritual
of which I was not presently aware, of which the urgency of the task I felt was
inescapable. That was the last time I found myself reading ashes until I began this
project. But that sudden experiment in archivization was there all along, an archive
of archive. All these threads only needed to be gently pulled in order to find myself,
from every direction, facing the memory of the Shoah.
Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say the absence of memory, post-
memory, a memory of forgetting. Practically every physical scrap of Jewish life in
Rhodes was eradicated, and in my family, there was likewise silence. My grandfather
rarely spoke of what he lost with my father; my father never spoke of it with me. In
fact, in an uncanny brush with history, my father found himself as a spectator at the
Eichmann trial in 1961, 40 years before 9/11 and the last day of my grandfather’s
shiva. I’ve asked my dad many times to share his memories of the trial. Each time he
describes the courtroom and the headphones, he describes in great detail Eichmann
in his little bulletproof box. But when I ask about the testimonies he heard, he goes
silent. He’s only able to offer an outline, to sketch out the periphery, but the picture
is incomplete. While my father has yet to say a word about the survivors testimonies’,
he has carried them with him, he has translated them into silence, perhaps the safest
container for their memory, and I have inherited this silence, these ghosts, a whole
host of witnesses And so faced with the mandate of “never forget” – an imperative
to archive – what am I to do? Paul Celan asks, “Who bears witness for the witness?”
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The question is all the more troubling when the witness is also ash. I am interested in
what exceeds representation, in the traces of loss.
I wasn’t aware that my impulse, my unconscious drive to preserve
Spiegleman’s ash was an act of mourning, an act fueled by or perhaps
summoned by mourning. The ash, the shadow signature memorializing the
original signature, gave it a weight that it perhaps did not want but that I saw as
inseparable. Similarly, memory is haunted by postmemory, testimony by fiction,
language by silence, what is there by what is not there. This project weaves
between those dualities, resists them, challenges them. In a way, it is an attempt
to fix ash in place, to build an afterimage of cinders that might remain.

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Introduction: Toward a Phenomenology of Silence

Silence plays the irreducible role of that which bears and haunts language, outside
and against which alone language can emerge.
– Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference

Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion
that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of
discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an
element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them
within over-all strategies. […]There is not one but many silences, and they are an
integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
– Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction

What does it mean to think silence? There is an undecidability to silence
that makes this thinking prone to slippage. Silence is on the edge or perhaps
creates the edge between sense and nonsense. This project explores edges
between the communicable and the incommunicable, the legal and the literary,
language and affect. Silence can mean either yes or no or can signal disinterest. It
can refer to either the voice or speech, but also to the sonorous, or to
background noise as John Cage emphasizes to be evidence that there is no pure
silence. In his lectures on silence, Cage wrote, “There is no such thing as an
empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to
hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot” (Cage 8). Cage made
this statement after emerging from an anechoic chamber at Harvard University.
He discovered that even in a space evacuated of sound, he found himself
listening to the sound of his own body, his breathing and blood. Absolute
silence will always be a fiction because we cannot escape background noise or
even the sounds of our own bodies. If silence is not a physical condition, can we
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think of silence then as something that happens, that happens to you, to a work,
to the world? How do we make the space for silence to emerge and what are the
conditions for this emergence? Cage goes on to claim that, “silence is conceived
of so that we may open our ears.” This notion of silence as a concept that draws
a border or frame so that we might be made aware of something else underlies
this project on testimony and memory. Silence is nearly impossible to define
because it slips through categorization and resists certainty.
This dissertation reimagines our understanding of silence as a theoretical
approach to testimony and witnessing in cases of trauma, focusing mostly on
sexual assault and genocide. Whereas silence has typically been understood as a
failure of language, I instead consider silence itself as a language of survival. I
engage with examples from literature (fiction and especially poetry), visual and
performance art, cinema, as well as archival testimony in order to track the
language of traumatic silence across disciplines and media. I approach the field
of trauma studies through performance theory in order to expand and
complicate the role of the viewer or reader as a witness, as the spectator is
always implicated in the performance.
My approach is interdisciplinary, with visual culture at the center,
intersecting with these other fields. I use literary theory to read visual art and
cinema, as well as archival documents. I question the limitations of voice in
testimony and the limitations of the archive to contain and catalog silence.
Because silence is not easily legible and does not offer a clear entry point, I offer
ways to both read and mark silence through readings of visual art and literature.
10
My reading of silence is largely informed by theories of language and trauma as
explored by thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Cathy Caruth,
Shoshana Felman, Roland Barthes, and Toni Morrison. This allows me to
ground my theory of silence in an existing theoretical conversation on the
effects of trauma on the voice and language and to offer my own intervention,
emphasizing performance studies as a way to imbue the reader or viewer with
responsibility or an ethical position – placing the text “in your hands” as
Morrison emphasizes.
Silence is not confined to an auditory sense; it is also visual, tactile,
affective. Silence involves gaps in all of the senses. My dissertation will pay close
attention to examples where silence is visual, where we can see silence. I am
interested in the effects that silence can have in a work, what it can do and what
it can be made to do. What is a work letting in when it makes room for silence?
I will also consider works that produce silence, that produce an unspeakable or
unsayable response. This response could arise because the work has affected the
viewer so profoundly that they cannot yet reply with words. It can also mean
that the work has transgressed something sacred, has crossed a line into the
forbidden or taboo, where shock or disgust manifests in silence as a refusal to
reply.
This project explores the silent, unspeakable, unnamable registers of
trauma testimony and representation. By focusing on extreme traumatic
experience, this project seeks to navigate the intersection and borders of sexual
assault and genocide. Both of these violent crimes (and sexual assault is always a
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significant part of any genocide) seek to erase the witness, or at the very least, to
produce so much doubt in survivor testimony that they may as well have been
erased. In this project, I use the concept “archive” to refer to both established
archives as well as what I refer to as performative archives. The focus of this
investigation takes a visual and performative approach to testimony and trauma
studies. By navigating literature, art, testimony, and archives through a visual
lens, it becomes a dual project of both criticism and witnessing.
So how do we begin to see or read something as slippery as silence?
Encountering silence can mean that there is nothing to say; it can serve as a
moment of pause or reflection, a separator, or indicate that something exceeds
the possibility of speech. Toni Morrison brings language and silence into our
hands calling on the responsibility one carries when one carries language.
Morrison writes, “Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor
should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its
reach toward the ineffable.”
1
As this project attempts to write in language, an
intervention into trauma studies, into narratives of trauma, I am interested in the
ways that reading and writing from the edge, the porous border between
language and silence might offer a way to witness rather than “pin down” these
multilayered narratives and the excess of meaning introduced by such trauma.

1
Toni Morrison, What Moves at the Margin
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This use of silence is closely tied to the possibility of phrasing as
introduced by Jean-François Lyotard in his writing on the différend. Lyotard
writes,
In the différend, something “asks” to be put into phrases, and suffers from
the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away. This is when
the human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of
communication learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies
silence…that they are summoned by language… to recognize that what
remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they
must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist (Lyotard, 13).

In the différend, silence places the demand on us and it is left to us to repair this
rupture. Phrasing becomes a placeholder for what cannot yet be said and as a
placeholder, it is meant to be temporary. By introducing a concept of time here, we
are made sensitive to the urgency, to the need to respond and not to leave it silent. In
the différend, the failure of language produces a need to create new idioms. This
conception of silence will be central throughout my project and also calls to a sense
of urgency, a silence that demands response. As I lay out this approach to silence, I
will explore examples in literature, visual art, and cinema where silence arrives as an
interruption that demands response. Lyotard’s offers us one way of framing this
interruption by revealing what is asked of us.
As my research is focused on the visual, I am especially interested in
engaging Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “scrubbed zone,” the element in an image
that exceeds figuration and appears as a smear. These theoretical approaches all
respond to and account for the unaccountable; they attempt to see silence. Deleuze
develops the concept of the scrubbed zone in The Logic of Sensation, an investigation
into the paintings of Francis Bacon. The central and recurring theme in Bacon’s
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work is the image of the silent scream. Bacon wanted to paint the scream more than
the horror, visualizing the sensation of the scream instead of the representation of
horror. Because of this, Bacon’s figures are depicted as figures in isolation, screaming
into an abyss. While the images may evoke violence, no violence is depicted, no
cause for the scream, only silence. The horror in these images is multiplied because it
originates from the silent scream, rather than the scream responding to a scene of
horror. This recalls Jacques Lacan’s differentiation between cri pur (pure scream) and
cri pour (scream for someone or something). Bacon resists narrative in the same way
silence resists narrative. The scream in the face of the invisible is a visualization of
trauma, that which necessarily exceeds or even breaks narration. The “scream is
botched” when it is attached to a narrative (Deleuze 36). Similarly, when traumatic
experience must be reduced to language, something will be lost as it is flattened into
a repeatable and therefore consumable experience. Is there a danger of abstraction?
A violence of abstraction? But resisting language and its reductions can lead to
conceptualization. This was Agamben’s fear; if we don’t narrativize the
muselmanner, the zombie-like figures in the concentration camp who survive in spite
of themselves, they will become an abstract concept instead of human victims.
Bacon modeled the screaming mouth after a photographic still from Sergei
Eisenstein’s silent film The Battleship Potemkin (1925) depicting a closeup of a
screaming nurse, her mouth open and her eye wounded. There are many layers of
translation at play as the paintings are influenced by a photograph from a film.
Through this origin story, we learn that the scream in Bacon’s painting is a scream
that was always mute, and in fact originated in silence. Deleuze turns to images to
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reveal the scream, as I am turning to images to reveal silence. It seems we need to see
what we can’t hear.

The scrubbed zones depict horrors which need to remain unintegrated,
suspended, distorted, yet visible, a present absence. The scrubbed zone is a space of
phrasing, of testimony, of what’s unimaginable and unrepresentable. Like the
différend, the scrubbed zone is the phrasing waiting for new idioms. But unlike
Lyotard, who insists on eventually narrating the silence, Bacon’s scrubbed zones are
forever in waiting. The visage waits for a face in perpetuity. Deleuze claims that
Bacon doesn’t paint the reality of the horror, the spectacle, because then death wins.
Depicting the feeling, the sensation, allows for a way out of the struggle to conceive
of the inconceivable. Deleuze identifies three forces acting on the subjects in Bacon’s
painting. The first is isolation, as all of these figures are suspended in blank scenes,
with no background or surrounding. The second is deformation, where the face
distorts into the scrubbed zone. The third and last force is dissipation, where the
figure fades and returns, although never the same.
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Through Deleuze and Bacon we can think through a reorganization of the
figure and figuration, one which I apply to language and communication. Allen
Feldman introduces the concept of traumatropism as a performative intervention
that addresses the reorganization of a body around a traumatic wound. He develops
this notion in Archives of the Insensible:
Nation-building projects, reconciliation processes, and movements for social
justice are energized by what can be called “traumatropism”… Local
communities and entire societies can reorganize their identities, histories, and
projects around the curvature of chosen wounding; this would be politically
constructed traumatropism. Traumatropes can also cohere into formations of
domination: institutional agendas, rules, and prohibitions as technologies of
memory. Traumatropes are eventually prescriptive and indicate a point of
historical stasis, a punctuation beyond which a society refuses to narrate
itself. (Feldman 230)

I am interested in the traumatropism of language, but not only language. Layers of
traumatropes are woven into this theory and approach of silence. Silence in each
example throughout this dissertation, arrives at a moment of wounding and reorients
the witness in that moment. In representing the event of falling silent and not the
circumstances of the event, is this silence also life-affirming? A mutism which is also
a reserve, in reserve, reorganizing itself to form language or a mobilization, an
utterance, a response, a demand, a traumatropism of the voice? Trauma which
exceeds narration, that fractures language and produces an endless ripple of foldings
in the task of translation is the subject at hand.
Because trauma is always mediated by language, recall, recollection,
representation, or testimony, and because trauma itself fractures and disrupts
presence and experience, when dealing with trauma, we are also dealing with
something else. We deal with the traumatic trace or shadow, interface with the
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afterimage, as the actual trauma is beyond our grasp. We invest in the trace, the
outline before us, that skeletal echo, a body of truth. The objects in this project
are all doubled, traumatic objects which we encounter because we cannot
encounter their referent.
As this project reads silence as an afterimage, it is only natural to turn to
performance, as performance is embedded in the trace and in the afterimage.
Performance is self-conscious and self-aware of its ephemerality. Moreover,
performance theory calls into question a crisis of the archive, because if you are
to archive a live event, what are you archiving except a body which is no longer
there? To archive performance is to archive the afterimage, and to invest
supplementary mediums such as video recording and photography as evidence
of the performance or the body which is no longer there. We already find
ourselves in the realm of the trace, of cinders, of afterimage; we have already
lost ground and begun to grasp for specters. We don’t know what to call the
body; the body is missing and yet we have all of these pieces, these supplements,
these echoes which contain traces of the original and yet also testify to the
missing body, a missing piece. This project arrives, or rather, insists, on the
intersection of trauma and performance theory. Performance art emphasizes the
role of the spectator – not just with regard to the work itself, but also with
regard to the spectating body – and so it is not unlike an act of witnessing. But
performance also problematizes categories of spectatorship. What exactly is the
performance? Some argue that it is the original performance or event, while
others argue that it also any documentation of the event, as in video recording
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or photography.
There are pockets of silence that are folded into spoken testimony, but
registers of the unspeakable which always remain. Silence is a product of trauma,
as traumatic experience often results in silence. This silence can either be the
inability to speak, or the inability to be heard or understood. Archives are
institutions of silence in that they insist that certain narratives and testimonies be
heard, while others are left out. Archives are always constructed against
something else. Can there be an archive that doesn’t produce silence?
Production of certain voices is always simultaneously the production of others’
silences.
Silence is neither inside nor outside of language. Because it lacks a distinct
border, we will focus on the frames through which it passes. The majority of the
works examined in this project draw our attention to the margins and the frames
they create, that they create within and create against. The frames are both literal and
theoretical as these works investigate and call for a reframing as well as a rethinking
of silence. Reframing isn’t just about a border, it’s about rethinking the inside and
outside, as well as that liminal space that divides it.
In rethinking silence, we are also rethinking the archive and its ability to
either contain or archive the unspeakable. Every trauma archive must contain this,
and there will always be excess, because that which must be translated and is subject
to language will necessarily displace something. This project takes place at the
intersection of the unspeakable and testimony, the inexpressibility and the incapacity
to “understand” and the violence of understanding. And yet the necessity and
18
demand for justice persists. This manifests as theater within the law, performative in
its oscillation between the unspeakable and the need to be spoken, the exemplary
and the example. All of this has, if nothing else, confirmed that we must expand our
concepts of testimony, justice, language, survival, archives, and so on.
Silence is imbued with all of its undecidability, its slipperiness; it is itself a
border, a background, a foreground, the medium and the message, a translation, a
transition, a breaking point, a beginning, a continuation, an ellipsis. If the work of
trauma, performance, and memory will find a meeting point, it must be in silence.
This project is about bodily memory, testimony, mourning, absorption, a trauma that
is carried in the body, a trauma we don’t see until we see, until we see what we don’t
see. While I am emphasizing the possibility of seeing silence in the examples I
navigate, I am also reading this emphasis on vision against the visual. Through this I
am following Rebecca Schneider, Peggy Phelan, and Fred Moten who lock into an
excess of meaning in objects that both resists and expands an understand of what we
see. Photographs become documents of sound recording for Moten, and archival
documents become live gestures for Schneider. Following silence is a way to witness
the excess of trauma and its continuing afterimages.
The first part of my dissertation proposes a conception of the public sphere
within a legal frame. As so many cases of sexual assault never make it to courtrooms,
public protest, demonstration, and performance art become a place of testimony and
witnessing, as do social media platforms. I especially consider the archives compiled
on Twitter and other platforms using hashtags to mark testimony and contribute to a
largely silenced and uncatalogued record.
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The second part of my dissertation focuses on silence as an aesthetic and
ethical motif in Holocaust literature. The Holocaust isn’t just a critical example of
atrocity, the case study so to speak, it is also the critical example of collective
memory thinking and formation. I explore silence as a tool to remember the dead
and mark the testimony that has been lost in the writings of Paul Celan, Edmond
Jabès, Jonathan Safran Foer, and others. I also examine cinema and documentary
footage, treating silence as visual, literary, and sonic.
The last part of my dissertation is largely concerned with media, technology,
and the future of both archive and testimony. This section is on memorializing,
memory, and haunting, as I reflect on the recent development of interactive
hologram testimony to survive the survivor, so to speak. In this section I revisit a
recurring theme throughout the dissertation on intergenerational trauma which I
read through digital media as I inquire into the fetishization of loss and mourning in
the age of social media and an archive fever across platforms which allows us to
continue communicating with the dead. This last chapter considers the paradoxical
tension of memorial and monuments projects which reflect the anxiety and fear of
silence as well as the production of silence.
These examples of visual art, literature, and cinema place personal and
individual experience into the public sphere and public memory in an effort both for
accountability but also to create a narrative that demands a body of witnesses. This
transformative act acknowledges a community of survivors, not just fragmented and
unconnected experiences, but a collective of voices and stories of survival and loss,
of trauma and recovery. The public display of performance art and especially the
20
emphasis on the spectator as witness to the performance and performing body
furthers this effort or moment of destigmatizing the victim by making it a public
performance, one which speaks to everyone, a call to witness. The transformation of
private and personal experience into public and collective memory allows for
accountability, for witnessing as justice and healing.

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In Search of Silence

There are not words to describe the world that is Auschwitz

–Stella Levi
(survivor, Auschwitz)

To whom do you tell it?

–Sara Paul
(survivor, Auschwitz)

I grew up hearing the story of how my cousin Flora and her sister Stella,
deported from the Greek island of Rhodes, survived Auschwitz because they were
talented bakers. They were spared hard labor because they were forced to work in
the kitchens; this offered them protection, refuge, and a bit of extra food – the
makings of survival. This version of the story is simple, translatable, suitable for
young children. Though I never heard it directly from Flora or Stella – I was afraid
to bring it up, not knowing what it might trigger – I heard it from enough relatives
that I accepted as truth.
One of the first testimonies I watched during my month-long fellowship at
the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA) in 2016 was Flora’s. It turned
out there was much I hadn’t heard, much that had been filtered out. She related to
her interviewer that she and Stella had to dig food scraps out of the kitchen trash.
When they found scraps of beet skins, they would rub them into their pale cheeks so
they would have a healthy and rosy blush that would help them pass inspections and
keep them alive. In the story I grew up with, I was spared the thought of Flora and
Stella digging through the trash to survive — or perhaps it was they who were
22
spared. Buried within what I thought I knew about my family’s history in the Shoah
was a silence, an absence. For whatever reason, Stella and Flora’s story arrived to me
with a hole at its heart.
Where do we house the words for which there are no words? The holes, the
gaps, the long breaths, the pauses in which the dead are remembered, held, still with
us in the quiet enclave carved out of language? How many blanks can fill this
archive? How many is still not enough? In many ways, this project was born out of
my experience in the VHA. During my fellowship, I sought out to discover silences
in genocide testimony, so that I might categorize them and gain insight into the
nature and meaning of these silences. I was in search of both silences in testimony
and silences as testimony. I sought to expand both the concepts of Silence and of
Testimony.
All testimony, and in particular all testimony about genocide, is sharing
something that is unshareable. Speaking about traumatic experience will always be
riddled with gaps, pauses, stutters, screams, and silences. Whereas silence has
typically been understood as a failure of language, this project considers, instead,
silence as a language and mark of survival. If you’ve ever listened to trauma
testimony, you know it’s full of silence. Silence isn’t just a phenomenon in these
testimonies, but rather another entry point into them. We’re conditioned to ignore or
dismiss what we don’t immediately understand. Because of this, silence in testimony
has not been treated with the same attention and importance as language. One of the
many ways we can see this is that silences are more often than not left out of written
transcripts. It is only recently that silence is starting to get recognition as an
23
important part of testimony, with The Shoah Foundation, as well as other
institutions, making an effort to include silences in the transcripts.
My first task as a VHA fellow was to categorize the types of silence found in
the survivor interviews. I began my research by studying the index and carefully
navigating index terms that might lead me to moments of silence, because it is nearly
impossible to create an index term for silence, not because it can’t be done, but
because it would open a Pandora’s box of questions – What counts as silence?; How long
must the silence be?; What about pauses or sighs?; What about body language? Another way to
phrase the dilemma is, In an archive of genocide testimony, where is there not silence? My
solution was to look up terms related to sexual assault, a particularly difficult issue to
speak about, thinking that this would lead me to silences, and to silences of particular
significance (the relationship between sexual assault, genocide testimony, and silence
will be explored further in a later chapter). With this as my starting point, I began to
take notes describing every encounter with silence I had. These ranged from these
literal moments of silence to a more symbolic story of silence. In my month-long
fellowship, I noted dozens of different silences, and I’m sure that I would find more
categories with more time in the archives. But I needed to distill these silences into a
handful of categories so that I could clearly communicate my research and its
significance to both current and future users of the archive. For the purposes of this
project, I was able to distill the categories down to four: moments of silence, omissions in
testimony, reluctance to speak, and the impossibility of telling.
Moments of Silence
24
These are literal moments of silence in testimony, either short or long pauses.
Often, these silences occur before or after describing horrible violence and sexual
assault. But just as often, they occur where you do not expect them. When there are
moments of silence in testimony, everything around that silence becomes weighted
with meaning. While these silences are frequently omitted from transcripts, upon
watching these testimonies, it is clear that silence imbues words with extratextual
meaning. It is easy to talk through a silence, to “break” it, but it is not so easy to
break it down, to comprehend and record it. It is interesting to note that when an
interviewer allows silence to stand, it allowed for further retrieval of memory, an
unraveling and narration that could have been lost and never archived if the silence
was interrupted. What is at the bottom of such silences? How deep can we go in
excavating them?
Omissions in Testimony
Survivors often say that they have to leave things out because there isn’t
enough time to tell absolutely everything; there are only so many hours for the
interview. Others say there are things they don’t want in the archive, and that there
are things that they don’t want to say on camera or that they don’t want their
children and grandchildren to know. This leaves us to wonder when an account can
be considered “complete” or “whole.”
As we will see later, there weren’t only omissions in testimony, but there
were also omissions in the trials that brought Holocaust testimony to the world
stage. In the Nuremberg Trials, rape and sexual assault were not documented, largely
25
due to the discretion or lack of interest on the part of the prosecutors. The
Nuremberg Trials were more concerned with producing documentary evidence then
recording survivor testimony, and so the crime of rape, for which no documentation
was to be found, was silenced. By contrast, the Eichmann Trial privileged survivor
testimony and focused to a much greater extent on survivors’ voices, whereas
Nuremberg was more focused on the perpetrators. But even the Eichmann Trial
failed to address sexual assault.
Among the VHA interviews I watched, one of the most painful testimonies
to witness was from survivor of Moniek Himmelschein, a survivor of child and
sexual abuse. Himmelschein’s testimony is told in a language of silence; he shakes
during the majority of his testimony, mostly looking down, very quiet, his mumbling
barely audible as the interviewer repeatedly asks him to speak up. If you could say
that an entire testimony was told in silence, it would be Himmelschein’s. The
interviewer asks for more information and the names of the other children who were
abused. Himmelschien says he’ll only give the names off camera because he doesn’t
want it recorded in the archive. This seems to be out of protection, a recognition of
the shame that the other survivors might carry. Yet it a purposeful omission, an
intentional silence, a conscious decision to forget, not to archive.
Reluctance to Speak
Many survivors reveal that they didn’t share their testimonies until decades
after the war. This silence most often resulted from a sense that people didn’t want
to hear about the Holocaust; many survivors discovered that not only the world was
26
indifferent to their story, but that their own families in America didn’t want to know.
Survivor Stella Levi states very clearly in her testimony, “For years nobody asked us
to talk about the Holocaust. Nobody wanted to know. Nobody wanted to listen”
(Stella Levi, VHA, Segment #105). Survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfish echoes this
experience:
What was upsetting for us was that nobody asked any questions. We did not
talk about it, which we found very disappointing because we thought that
with what we have seen and gone through we will change the world. And
nothing like that will ever happen again. We were full of great ideas. Instead
of that we fell into a hole of silence and I’m not the only one who will tell
you that. Questions were not asked and if I now think back if I had been
asked any questions, like for instance Tell me what was it like in Aushwitz, I’m
not sure I could have answered…I think it needed to have a century for
people to address this. (Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, VHA, Segments #110-111)
The Impossibility of Telling
Some survivors expressed doubt that any amount of speaking could serve to
translate their experience. Sara Paul expressed this sentiment: She states in her VHA
testimony that she did not tell her sons how their grandmother, Paul’s mother, died,
because it was too degrading; it is preferable to allow them to think their
grandmother died in the gas chamber. She goes on ask in testimony, “To whom do
you tell it? It’s not in the history books what I’ve seen.” Her statement opens up the
complexity of this archive, asking for the witnesses to show themselves. Who are
these archives for? Despite the existing archives, despite Nuremberg and Eichmann,
despite the many books published by survivors, Paul points to the silence written
into history books. Despite all of the testimony, all of the archive, she still cannot
find her story in the historical record.
27
Stella Levi describes the ineffectiveness of language in a passage of testimony
that is itself riddle with silences: “It’s impossible to describe… because… what can I
say? There are not words to describe the world that is Auschwitz.” Arthur
Chrustowski states that he regularly tells classrooms where he goes to speak about
his experiences that he can barely believe them himself: “If I can’t believe it, how can
I make you believe?” Instead, he tells schoolchildren, that “impossible things
happened,” that “the brain cannot take it.” These statements emphasize that
speaking about the Holocaust is both impossible and necessary, that it must be told
despite this impossibility of telling. Lasker-Wallfisch mocks the question put to her
by the interviewer, “Will you tell me about your experience in the Holocaust?” by
repeating it back in a sarcastic tone. On one level, by participating in the interview,
she acknowledges how necessary it is to ask and answer that question. Yet it is an
absurdity to think we can expect to understand a survivor’s experience.
Ita Gordon at the Shoah Foundation spoke to me about testimony that was
ignored because it was seen as less useful for education, and because the genocide
archives is geared toward communication and learning. Gordon cited one testimony
where the survivor repeated over and over, “What can I tell you?” Gordon explained
that because the testimony lacked facts and specificity, it was overlooked. This
testimony, which we unsuccessfully attempted to retrieve, expressed the
inexpressible. By repeating, “What can I tell you?”, the survivor has already said so
much. It is telling that in an archive meant to be accessible, to offer up survivor
testimony when it is wanted, two researchers were unable to pull up this survivor’s
testimony. In the face of his silence, the archive failed.
28
As my research progressed, I found that focusing on literal moments of
silence was far too limiting, as almost every testimony contained its own complex
web of silence. While each category of silence was revealing in itself, I watched
testimony after testimony that spoke to the very edges of language, the limits of
words, the deep impossibility to say, and the even deeper need to understand. I
discovered a network of silence, embedded and woven throughout the archive,
words splintered at their roots by each silence. The silence in these testimonies is
sobering; it is reflective; it calls us back to the horror at the center of each story and
of the archive itself. The call to bear witness to these silences is also a larger call for
accountability. The VHA and its testimonies has been critical to my formation of a
concept of silence that is bound up with ethical witnessing. And indeed, silence in
the context of testimony is symbolic of all the testimony that was never given,
including survivors who haven’t been able to speak about their experience as well as
those who did not survive. Not to witness silence is to lose that body of unspoken
testimony. The study of silence in this context is about both silence as a language of
survival and the danger of silence as looking on, the silence of hearing and turning
away. In listening to silences, we must be mindful of the silence of those who stood
by and did nothing. Learning to read silence, by contrast, fits into the larger project
of bearing witness as an active and ongoing process.
Elie Wiesel was among the first to suggest that in the face of the trauma of
the Shoah, silence may in fact be more ethical then language. In a 1973 interview, he
explained that language carries with it the danger of commodification: “Our guilt
now derives from the feeling that perhaps we should not have spoken at all,
29
especially in light of some of the vulgarity that surrounds this theme today.
Theologians make theology out of it, philosophers make philosophy out of it,
politicians make politics out of it, JDL warns, “Never again.” The subject has
become an instrument to be used. And this I deeply resent” (Franciosi 53). In
silence, one does not risk misspeaking or being taken out of context. Wiesel
famously swore himself to silence, refusing to speak about the Shoah, a ten-year vow
of silence. And in fact, he has frequently suggested, as in a 1973 interview with
Harold Flender, that if it could be sustained, silence may be a more faithful
testimony to the Shoah than speech: “I can see this possibility – 1945, all the
survivors, all over Europe, should have gotten together in a secret meeting and taken
a vow of silence, not to speak about what had happened” (Franciosi 22). Instead of
translating the rupture of the Shoah, maybe the best translation is no translation, as
any attempt at using words will fall short. But Wiesel concedes that this approach
risks losing more than it preserves. Prompted by an interviewer from the Paris
Review in 1978 that “by remaining silent we lose communication,” Wiesel responds,
“That’s why I did not keep silent. If I had thought that by my silence, or rather by
our silence, we would have achieved something, I think I would have kept silent. I
didn’t want to write those books. I wrote them against myself. But I realize that if we
do not use words, the whole period will be forgotten.” An archive of trauma faces a
paradox: to speak is to attempt to translate the untranslateable, while to remain silent
is to risk forgetting. Is there a reading of silence, a literary or artistic intervention,
that threads between these parallel dangers?
30
Giorgio Agamben reflects on the task of witnessing in Remnants of Asuchwitz,
“The survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to. As a
consequence, commenting on survivors’ testimony necessarily meant interrogating
this lacuna or, more precisely, attempting to listen to it” (Agamben 13). How does
one listen to lacuna, to the space between words? Testifying to an absence, listening
to an absence, recording an absence – these tasks are essential work in witnessing
testimony of trauma. Silence is the language in which rupture is communicated; it
exists not just between words, but against words. As Derrida writes, silence “bears
and haunts language, outside and against which alone language can emerge” (Derrida,
54).
To bear witness to language we must bear witness to silence. My project at
the VHA produced a split between the role of researcher and witness. As a
researcher, I was intent on understanding and exploring the complexity of the
silences I discovered. But as a witness, I knew that understanding was not necessarily
possible, nor even the goal. There is tension between the two positions, of wanting
to jump around in testimony, jump around by index, but also wanting to listen to the
testimony as it is told. Moving from index term to index term produces a new
silence, overlays the interviews with blanks that cover both the language and silences
of testimony.
How do we assume the role of witness without losing the insight of the
scholar, without losing, in my case, a sense of silence in testimony? Artist and
theorist Bracha Ettinger reads art as testimony, and uses the term aesthetic
wit(h)nessing to express a sharing, a being-with that goes beyond the mute witness,
31
beyond the act of merely hearing and seeing. This understanding allows testimony to
breathe, to speak beyond its limits and borders. Ettinger, writes Griselda Pollock,
expands the witness’s “conceptual range from the legal and testimonial meaning of
bearing witness to the crime against the other, to being with, but not assimilated to,
and to being beside the other in a gesture that is much more than mere ethical
solidarity” (Pollock 831). By shifting from spoken testimony to testimony in art, we
can translate silence into different media, into a new arena that can reflect back into
literature and the spoken word and provide insight on the role of the witness, and
within that, the role of silence. Pollock writes, “Art becomes a keeper of historical
memory for the injured other by creating the site for a novel trans-subjective and
transhistorical process that is simultaneously witness and wit(h)ness.” Can Shoah
testimony, as it was surely intended, produce this “trans-subjective and
transhistorical process”? Pollock argues that art can “open up a threshold between
now and then, us and them to create a shared borderspace that acknowledges the gap
between different beings, times and places, while ethically making each partner
vulnerable to the other’s trauma.” Is this not precisely the goal of the VHA, precisely
the meaning of the question, “Will you tell me about your experience in the
Holocaust?”
Art and aesthetics have the power to shake us out of amnesia and
indifference. Aesthetics produces an afterimage effect, they stay with you; you
continue to work through it and work on it, even subconsciously. The aesthetic
element allows for the expansion of borders and thresholds; it allows the narrative to
take on myth and stretch beyond disparate cultures, moments, peoples. It is what
32
allows the work to speak to anyone, not just those directly implicated and embedded
in the narrative. It allows the image to live on. While language lacks this universality,
this undecidability that causes it to linger in the imagination, silence is harder to read
through, harder to ignore or to quickly grasp. This project argues that silence can
open up “a borderspace the may become a threshold,” (838) that it can be a bridge
between others and create what Ettinger calls “matrixial alliances,” allowing us to go
beyond the role of the spectator, to go from witnessing to wit(h)nessing, from being
near to being-with.
In bearing witness to trauma, it is crucial to make space for the
unrepresentable. Perhaps this is why Edmond Jàbes, in all his writing about the
Shoah, never names Auschwitz. He leaves it as a hole at the center of his books. It is
the unnamable that drives the text, drives the writing around it and towards it, drives
witnessing. Wiesel states “Only one of my books, Night, deals directly with the
Holocaust; all the others reveal why one cannot speak about it.” (Franciosi 53). How
can Wiesel say that his entire oeuvre, a catalogue of essential texts about the
Holocaust, do not deal directly with it, other than a single book? In writing about
why one cannot speak about the Holocaust, Wiesel creates a space, indeed an entire
library, for the unsayable, a monument to silence, against language.
Through this project, we will see how silence not only permeates testimony
about trauma, but also visual art, performance, law, and public art as they deal with
trauma. To excavate words and the spaces between them, it is necessary to leave
words behind, to project literature onto performance and painting, onto the
courtroom and the monument square. If, indeed, as Stella Levi warns, “There are not
33
words to describe the world that is Auschwitz,” how might we look beyond words,
beyond language, into the language of rupture, the silence that defies and supersedes
medium, the silence that is both frame and content? If we are to take the survivors at
their word that there are not words, how do we read their silences, instead, to do the
essential job of witnessing, and wit(h)nessing? While we will return to testimony
later, this project uses the words of survivors, and their silences, as a jumping off
point for this crucial task

34
PERFORMING ON THE EDGE OF SILENCE

As theories of trauma and repetition might also instruct us, it is not presence that
appears in performance but precisely the missed encounter – the reverberations of
the overlooked, the missed, the repressed, the seemingly forgotten. Taken from this
perspective, performance does not disappear though its remains are immaterial.

– Rebecca Schneider

Performance art uses silence as a language in which to communicate,
intervene, and respond to sexual violence. I’m interested in this choice to present a
silent performance or static images in the face of such horrific violence, especially
with the familiar rhetoric of “Break the silence” which is attached to the discussion
of sexual assault. So why share a story through silence? What does silence allow for
the performance to do, for the audience to hear or see, that speech or sound cannot
do? Are there places silence can go that language cannot? Places it can traverse and
return, carrying narratives that testify to a space where language would be inadequate
to speak. Silence in these works is about more than just reclaiming the silence of
victimhood, or the silence of shame into a strength and powerful tool. It’s also about
acknowledging silence on its own, and its capabilities in this context to move
performance in ways that language cannot. It is a confrontation and intervention
with language, with speech, with communication itself. What I mean by a
confrontation with communication is that it restages, or restructures how we see
bodies, how we view survivors and how we witness testimony.
Silence has been brandished as a weapon used to enforce shame in cases of
sexual assault. The pervasive culture of victim blaming and shaming has kept many
35
survivors from coming forward and sharing their stories.
2
This chapter aims to read
silence against the traditional understanding as evidence of shame, and instead
conceive silence as a renunciation of shame. More than any other medium,
performance art is crucial for this debate.
Performance art raises questions about presence and absence, and the status
of the body in a way that is essential to the discourse on sexual assault. Performance
also implicates the spectator in the scene they are witnessing. Amelia Jones writes
that, “body art depends on documentation, confirming–even exacerbating–the
supplementarity of the body itself” (Jones 15). Performance art is a live event that
lives on in its documentation.
3
Sexual assault is a crime that does not always produce
visual evidence and documentation, and yet justice depends on documentation.
Because of this, victim impact statements have taken the place of visual evidence.
Jones states that “Body and performance art expose, precisely, the contingency of
the body/self not only on the other of the communicative exchange (the audience,
the art historian) but on the very modes of its own (re)presentation” (Jones 17).

2
Calling survivors ‘survivors’ instead of ‘victims’ is one way of removing shame and the stigma of
being a victim but it also reinforces and validates that there is shame and stigma in being a victim. So
how do we change this? It also creates distinctions and separations within a larger community of those
who have endured sexual violence. Not all have survived, not all are surviving, not all tell their stories
and seek justice. ‘Survivor’ places distance between the term and ‘victim’, it removes itself as though
‘victim’ will tarnish it. It also erases the horror, subsumes it in a narrative of triumph. In her book
Hunger, Roxanne Gay details why she prefers the term victim over survivor.

3
Amelia Jones insists that the live performance should not be privileged over the documentation,
either photography or video recording of the performance as opposed to others who see the
documentation as losing something from the aura of the live. Jones claims that the live performance
itself is already mediated in one’s experience of it, therefore the documentation is just another form an
already existing mediated experience of the performance.

36
Silence disrupts both the narrative and patriarchal discourse. In performance,
silence is not tangible, but it is palpable. The affective capabilities of silence in
performance transform the aesthetic experience into an ethical one as the audience is
moved and impacted by the silences. Silence lets the narratives move from the
individual personal story to the collective larger narrative of ongoing violence and
other victims, especially those whom are unable to speak. Silence is an invitation to
this larger narrative and reality of atrocity. This chapter will explore the role of
silence in the performances of artists Ana Mendieta, Luzene Hill, and Emma
Sulkowicz, whose work spoke out about sexual assault, as well as interventions into
the discourse of violence and the body from performances by Marina Abramovic
and Yoko Ono. The performances by these artists all take place within the context of
sexual violence conducted in institutionalized spaces, namely the gallery and the
university. Marina Abramovic’s body becomes a site to explore a larger conception
and theory of gendered violence. Anna Mendieta uses her own body to tell the story
of another who did not survive her assault. Emma Sulkowicz’s body is the body of
survival; it is both symbolic and quite literal as she herself survived the assault. Her
body speaks to the crime that she survived and also to other survivors. Silence in
these works is a matter of agency. It is a renunciation, and becomes the medium of
communication about sexual violence. In performing through silence, these artists
perform on the edge of mourning and survival, of disappearance and remaining, of
presence and absence, of life and death. Thus, silence becomes the medium through
which performance art redirects shame from the victims and survivors to the society
and culture that shame them in the first place. I will show how using tools from
37
visual studies in conversation with literary theory can place silence at the center of
the visualization of sexual violence and the refusal to accept shame.
Traumatic experience often complicates language, but sexual violence
shatters language. In this sense, silence is a mark of survival as much as it is a mark
of powerlessness and victimhood. Any discourse on trauma will be riddled with gaps,
pauses, stutters, screams, and silences. This is when testimony, at the edge of the
unspeakable, truly begins. Sharing the unshareable is the condition of all testimony.
Silence and shame are the twin byproducts of traumatic experience. They are bound
together, keeping each other’s secrets. Sexual assault, in this context, is something
that cannot be spoken about, but at the same time must be. For this reason, silence
plays a central role in feminist performance art as an alternative to language in
communicating about violence against women. Performance can use silence to
represent that which otherwise cannot be represented and request that the audience,
likewise, speak out. This use of silence recalls Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the
différend, a concept which he outlines in the text of the same name. The différend arises
when something “asks” to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not
being able to be put into phrases right away. “This is when the human beings who
thought they could use language as an instrument of communication learn … that
they are summoned by language, to recognize that what remains to be phrased
exceeds what they can presently phrase…” (Lyotard, 13). In the différend, the collapse
of language into silence places the demand on us to repair this rupture. By
introducing a concept of time, we are made sensitive to urgency. This is a pressing
silence, one that demands response and repair. The différend lets silence breathe, and
38
allows it to have its own language, albeit a temporary one. It creates an ethical
silence, one that allows for reflection and listening, stalling the impulse to explain
and narrate, giving space and thought to the weight of trauma while also insisting on
the production of language. This understanding, one that is faithful to the event,
faithful to the traumatic wound, recognizes silence as the victim’s first testimony
until they are able to speak. The différend offers that speech must come from this
rupture, because the silence cannot be allowed to remain. The tension of impatient
patience is always present with the différend, as silence is now allowed to be the final
word. Bearing witness to the différend is active for Lyotard, and involves translating
silence into speech. One doesn’t passively witness; witnessing is to find idioms, to
create, to respond. “Bearing” witness is to bear the weight of these silences. Whereas
the différend insists on the eventuality of language, these works not only let silence
speak, but they let silence remain. Lyotard’s conception of silence is a limiting one in
that it marks an end of silence. Why must silences be translated into language, why
insist on this alchemy?
Feminist performance art often seeks to turn a passive witness into an active
one and mobilize response. Griselda Pollock claims that art has the power to
“awaken the forgetfulness of the world” (Pollock 848). Art, and especially effective
aesthetic experiences, shake the viewer into an urgent and ethical position. It
highlights and contends with the fact that we continually look away, because it is too
painful to bear and to witness. This act of looking away instills shame, deepening it,
encrypting it further into secret and silence. The responses of feminist performance
artists aren’t about fully understanding the pain of others, but rather promising to
39
bear witness, promising to register the other’s pain in one’s own body, and therefore
to remember in one’s bodily memory the body of the other. In Susan J. Brison’s
work, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self, she cites the importance of a
social body which listens to survivor testimony. Not looking causes irreparable
erasure, and banishes the bodies, the voices, and the experiences of others. Shame is
deeply tied to visibility because the more visible the survivor and survivor’s story can
be, the more shame can be let go. Brison makes a case for a larger framing of
gender-based violence instead of conceiving sexual violence as individual cases. She
claims that seeing it as individual unconnected cases makes the issue invisible, and
that conceptualizing sexual violence as a larger phenomenon gets us closer to
eliminating it. The performances of artists such as Mendieta, Sulkowicz, and
Abramovic all present a powerful visualization of sexual violence, one which I argue
stands against forgetting, and represents the most powerful answer to the silence and
shame that causes these narratives to disappear from our cultural consciousness.
Brison complicates this by asserting, “The very prevalence of sexual violence can,
paradoxically, render it invisible” (Brison 192). Visualizing violence as a concept
makes it prone to disappearance. If we perceive it to be everywhere, and these
performances to symbolically address a larger reality of sexual violence and a larger
community of victims and survivors, the sweeping nature of this understanding
makes it difficult to style oneself as a witness. There is a difference between
witnessing a case — a moment, a location of sexual violence — and witnessing a
larger concept of violence, which is not associated with any particular time or region.
40
The entire posture of witnessing threatens to vanish between these two crucially
different positions.
While the focus of this chapter is thinking about the role of silence in
performance and addressing sexual assault and gendered violence, I will first begin
with two of the most evocative performances in the context of women and
representations of violence. Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece and Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm 0
are perhaps two of the most oft-referenced performance pieces as feminist protests.
Exclusive feminist readings of these works, and the other works addressed in this
chapter, take too narrow an approach and excludes the complexity of these
narratives. But emphasizing silence as a language of trauma, listening, ethics,
promise, and memory allows these narratives to live on, expand, and take on wider
breadth to account for not only gendered violence and assault, but also other
traumatic narratives as well.
Marina Abramovic is perhaps the artist most referenced in the context of
silence and performance art, especially after her 2010 retrospective The Artist is
Present at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. In this performance, viewers
were invited, one at a time, to sit facing her. The performance consisted of viewer
and artist staring at each other in silence. It is her earlier work, however, and
especially her Rhythm 0 performance in 1974, that lends complexity to what it might
mean to think silence. For this performance, Abramovic placed 72 objects on a table
that had uses ranging from innocuous to dangerous. The former included a feather, a
rose, bread and olive oil, while the latter included a knife and a gun with one bullet
(Abramovic, 74). The only instructions given to the audience were that they were
41
free to use the objects in any way they desired. Abramovic sat silent and still for six
hours while audience members cut off her clothes, cut her skin, and drew on her,
violating her body. At its most heightened and extreme moment of aggression, one
audience member placed the loaded gun in Abramovic’s hand and arranged her
finger on the trigger, then positioned Abramovic to point the gun at herself. The
potential for violence was consciously made possible by the choice of objects on the
table, although there was no telling how far the violence would go. The threat of
violence was there from the very beginning, a spectral presence framing the duration
of the piece. The violence was controlled in the sense that Abramovic’s performance
intentionally tested these limits, and the fact that she had the power to end the piece
at any time. In this piece, the viewer does not witness the violation and exploitation
of a vulnerable victim, but instead witnesses the violation of a woman with power, a
woman in control. Abramovic’s own body in the process of being marked and
stripped becomes a witness itself. She stands in as a cultural witness, absorbing and
reflecting a societal drive that not only suppresses, but that also shames and
humiliates victims of assault. In a sense, Abramovic becomes the social body that
Brison proposes.
42
The piece begins and ends in silence, but it also illustrates the undecidability
of silence, namely that it can mean either yes or no. The longer the silence lasted, the
more the audience felt they had permission to continue their aggression and
violence. To officially stop the piece and prevent any further violence or harm to her
body, Abramovic stood up and began to walk towards the crowd. The audience
scattered away from her in a gesture of communal shame. She doesn’t speak, but her
silence condemns them; it is an accusation. This moment is an interruption, her body
no longer still, although still silent. Her body calls for their collective accountability
without saying a word. Her silent body, when still, gives full permission to the
audience to continue their behavior, but, when moving, becomes a speech-act,
43
shaming them for what they’ve done. It is also a call to witness the violence they’ve
inflicted.
Sound artist and theorist Christof Migone reads Abramovic’s performance
through Antonin Artaud’s concept of flesh-speech. Artaud conceives of the entire body
as a source of somatic utterance, rather than restricting speech to the mouth and
vocal apparatus. Migone claims that while we do not hear from Abramovic, we still
very much hear her. Migone writes, "Opting for speechlessness, Rhythm 0 speaks as
ambassadors of the mute world, where the diplomatic act is an effacement which indeed
masks a confrontation…Abramovic’s supine body speaks back in so far as it hosts
and displays the traces of objectifications, it provides a scene for it. The body
becomes reflector and vessel, the somatic utterance is radically exteriorized”
(Migone, 78). Her body is muted through acts and gestures of objectification, but her
body is not a static object; it is able both to absorb and sustain the acts of the
audience, as well as to reflect it back to them, forcing them to confront their own
violent impulses and desires. All of this is said without ever saying a word.
Communication in this performance is effective, and made possible by the dynamism
and weight of silence. José Esteban Muñoz insists, “Affect is contagious.” Its ability
to radiate out into the space of the viewer establishes an ethical bond and disperses
shame, thereby opening up a space for witnessing and reflection. It is this capacity
for reflection that allows for discussion, to speak about the objectification of bodies,
and the all-too-quick turn to violence. As many of her works test the limits of artist
and audience, this piece especially pushes these ideas to a very dangerous edge.
44
The audience reads Abramovic’s body in transformation and it is in this
transformation that violence takes place. In the Logic of Sensation, Deluze reads the
bodies of Bacon’s paintings as bodies in transition. They begin in one form and then
they are distorted, and this distortion is the zone of violence, the zone of the
insensible. Abramovic begins her performance as a recognizable figure, as the artist
herself, after which she transitions into a canvas onto which the audience exerts acts
of violence. Her face disappears, so to speak, allowing the violence to escalate. When
Abramovic stands up and walks towards the audience, she reconstitutes her body
and again becomes a figure, her identity and face reassembled before the audience’s
shock of recognition. Through silence we witness Abramovic pass through the zone
of the insensible and return.
4

Abramovic’s piece exposes the audience’s willing participation in the
violation of a woman’s body, as well as the participation of those who remained
silent and stood by. These performances, beginning with Abramovic’s, are not easy
to watch, but they do, and should, unsettle the audience. They seem to be speaking,
if not directly, to the bystander effect. Rebecca Schneider alerts us to a “complicity in
looking,” where you, as the viewer, are “caught looking” (Schneider 162). One
cannot merely watch images of violence and violation and stay removed, distant, and

4
I am also thinking about this scene through the “visor-effect”. Schneider challenges
Derrida’s notion of the “visor effect” in Specters of Marx. Derrida writes that the
specter of Hamlet’s father sees without being seen through the use of a visor.
Schneider insists that it is the actor, not the specter, that sees without being seen.
The visor hides the live actor, the live body performing the specter. The specter then
becomes specter in writing, not on the stage. Abromovic sees without being seen as
the audience forgets she is there. Schneider claims that the potential horror of the
visor-effect is that we might meet the eyes of the actor playing the specter.
45
indifferent. The moment that you see these images, you become implicated in the
scene and become a witness. Sophie Ann Oliver asserts that there is such a thing as
unethical and ethical spectatorship, writing, “the dangers of unethical spectatorship
lie not only in the act of looking away but also, and perhaps even more so, in the act
of looking on” (Oliver 121). Abramovic’s piece tests the limits of the performing and
body and the audience. We witness a scene of violence as it builds, and the many
layers of silence that both frame and occupy the scene. Ana Mendieta explores a
different limit of audience and artist in her work, Untitled (Rape Scene), testing the
ethical responsibility of her audience. Where Abramovic places the potential for
action and violence in the hands of the audience, Mendieta places in their hands the
potential for witnessing.
In an interview, Abramovic emphasized that the piece was responding to
criticism of performance art at that time which felt that performance artists were
exhibitionists and masochists. Abramovic’s response through Rhythm 0, “was to do
nothing,” and to let the audience create the piece. These performances test the limits
of the body, Abramovic argues in fact that the body is limitless, and that once you
push the body to a limit, it becomes about the mind. Her work, through its slowness,
its duration and endurance, testing the limits of the performing and spectating body
by moving towards the edges, the pieces become a meditation on presence.
“At that moment, everybody run away. People could not actually confront with me
as a person.”
5
Abramovic’s work is intimately tied to violence, many of her

5
Marina Abramovic Institute
46
performances manifest violence and the threat of violence, although mostly violence
done to herself.
Even prior to Abramovic’s Rhythm 0, Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece highlighted the
objectification of the female body, gendered and sexual violence, and the cutting and
tearing away of societal indifference to expose the real. Ono premiered this piece in
Japan in 1964 first at the Yamiachi Concert Hall in Kyoto and in Tokyo a month
later, and then in 1965 at Carnegie Hall in New York. There have been several re-
performances of Cut Piece, and it is a work that continues to take place, continues to
cut. Ono invited members of the audience to come up to the stage where she sat
silent and motionless, clothed next to a pair of scissors. The audience was given total
freedom. Whereas Abramovic did not react to the audience, Ono had fleeting
moments of response, most notably attempting to cover her breasts when an
audience member first exposed them. Both shame and shamelessness is evident in
these pieces. The shamelessness of the naked and violated female body mirror the
shamed audience. It is quite interesting that the first performances took place in
concert halls instead of galleries. What is the significance of performing in a concert
hall? The audience is certainly significantly larger. Ono even wrote a score for the
performance. She has also directed others performing the piece.
Ono never claimed that the piece was feminist, nor did she express any
feminist goals for the piece. We can’t restrict a reading of this performance merely to
a feminist framing; rather, we might say that this piece, made up of hundreds of cuts,
creates one significant cut that we are exploring and following for the wound it
leaves behind, and that this is a feminist cut; but it is certainly not the only one.
47
Audience members had to approach her one at a time, and they were allowed to keep
the piece of clothing they cut off of her. There is a strange relic experience here, the
holding on after cutting away, the keepsake, the trophy, the archive in pieces or piece
by piece. One claim against the feminist reading is that Ono wrote in the score that
the performer could be male or female, indicating that this was not a piece about
sexual violence or a feminist statement about the objectification of women.
Performance theorist Peggy Phelan writes that the performing body has always been
gendered feminine (Phelan, Acting Out, 14). According to this statement, even if
a male were to perform this piece — and there was at least one such performance —
that the male body would be read as feminine.

Ono performed the piece again on September 15, 2003 at Theatre Le Ranelagh,
Paris, France. Jennifer Allen writes of Ono’s 2003 performance as serving “not
merely to ensure the continued existence of her work, but in order to make a
difference in the present.” She cut into the present with the tools of the past,
marking the present. Ono claimed that her 2003 reenactment was a response to
9/11, an effort to insist on peace. The political register of this work cuts across time,
as it suggests an ongoing reflection on war and bodies subject to violence while the
48
audience, or world, looks on. This re-performance in a different decade and different
context reveals how these pieces can both survive and exceed their initial context
and moment to remain in the future.
Art historian Thomas Crow notes that the emotional tension that Cut Piece
produced manifests in its audience, rather than the performer. In its ability to carry
its message through and into the body of the audience, this type of unsettling
performances transfers onto the audience the burden of the performing body’s
psychical or emotional stress. Crow writes, “It is difficult to think of an earlier work
of art that so acutely pinpoints (at the very point when modern feminist activism was
just emerging) the political question of women’s physical vulnerability as mediated by
regimes of vision” (Crow 133). With Cut Piece, what interests me is the audience, the
cutting away of fabric into strips and then the holding onto the strips. The tension in
both Abramovic and Ono’s “event” pieces arises from the fact that the possibility of
violence was there from the beginning, a spectral presence framing the piece until it
finally took hold. The ritual of cutting evokes cutting into cloth, textile, but also
cutting a text, an archive, and a cutting into pieces of an archive.
The context of Cut Piece as a musical performance, or as a score Ono wrote
for others to perform, forces us to rethink the use of silence in this piece. In music,
silence is used as tension, and also allows the music to resonate, giving it space to
breathe and expand. This silence as resonance seems key to what Ono is performing
through her body. In the context of musical silence, this piece is about resonance,
about creating a larger breath, of allowing each cut to have sound, thereby expanding
itself and producing tension between the cuts.
49
Where Abromovic and Ono’s works highlight the performing body, Cuban
American performance artist, Ana Mendieta, performs the absent body. Mendieta’s
works make visible the absent female body through the traces and impressions the
body leaves behind. In her works where the performing body is present, she presents
the body in a way that obscures, distorts, and brings that visible body toward
disappearance. Mendieta’s Untitled (Silueta Series) confronts the viewer with trace
remains, images of an absent woman’s body repeated in different locations. The
works are all untitled, evoking the unspeakable and unnamable, the silence of the
name. We are witnessing an absent body, and even more, these haunted silhouettes
are shrouded in the silence of mourning, a quiet vigil. Silence therefore operates in
these works on three levels, beginning with the title, the content, and extending to
the frame. The powerful, yet eerie aspect of these works is that they make it possible
for one to see silence. Mendieta’s performative earth works are all made to disappear.
Her own body is imprinted into the earth, leaving behind only its trace. The viewer
experiences the belatedness of trauma, arriving on the scene too late, and left to
mourn what cannot be directly witnessed. The only means of viewing these works is
through photographs. For Roland Barthes, the photograph always signals death as it
captures the becoming-specter of the subject (Barthes 14). These photographs
silently say death — either that it has happened or will happen. It seems appropriate
that this series can only be seen in a medium that will always evoke a sense of loss. It
also attests to the medium of the earth works themselves, which are no longer there,
having washed away along the shores of Oaxaca, having been grown over in the
meadows of Iowa, or having been burned to cinders.
50
Mendieta claimed that her Silueta series was about the connection between
women and Mother Nature, but with her strong feminist politics and her activism
addressing violence done to women, it is difficult to divorce those sentiments and
concerns from the series, which reads more like eulogies to disappeared women than
a celebration of nature, but following the traces left behind, these readings are not
distinct, in fact they are interwoven throughout her work. Her artist statement reads
My art is grounded in the belief in one Universal Energy which runs through
everything from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant,
from plant to galaxy.
My works are the irrigation veins of the Universal fluid. Through them
ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulations,
the unconscious thoughts that animate the world.
There is no original past to redeem; there is the void, the orphanhood, the
unbaptized earth of the beginning, the time that from within the earth looks
upon us. There is above all the search for origin”
6

There is no origin yet there is the search for origin, an origin which is a void.
Mendieta was a Cuban exile, and this motif of exile can be read in her series as we
witness the repeated trauma of her own uprooting. Identity and exile are linked
throughout her work, linking her absent or obscured body to the earth is also fixing
this void, this exile into a physical location. The haunting of these images is no doubt
heightened by Mendieta’s untimely and unsolved death in 1985 when she fell from
the 34
th
floor of her Greenwich Village apartment. It is the trace of her body that we
see in this series, we witness her own disappearance, the fall to her death, and the
crime scene left behind. Her husband, minimalist artist Carl Andre, was charged with

6
Jane Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta?
51
her murder but acquitted in a trial by judge. The court transcripts are sealed leaving
the justice process just as enigmatic as her death.
7

Mendieta’s Silueta’s, accessed only through photographs, are twice removed:
removed from the site of the original performance but also removed by the distance
and slippage of the photographic medium, always capturing something other.
Barthes claims each photograph confronts us with the return of the dead, adding
another layer of haunting to Mendieta’s already spectral photographs. In Jane
Blocker’s book, Where is Ana Mendieta?,

she writes about the insistence of the absent
body as way of remaining and even resisting. The title of her book is both a question
and mobilizing call to witness. The question was first asked by which was first asked
by the Guerilla Girls in a 1992 protest at the Guggenheim for their exhibit of all
white men, one of whom was Carl Andre. The protesters were demanding to know
where the representation of Mendieta exists in the art world, but also asking where
are the women of color and artists of color in this space. The protesters held up her
name outside of the Guggenheim, making her appear in that marginal space.

7
Robert Katz, Naked by the Window
52
The question “Where is Ana Mendieta,” is both about her and her work, and
extended beyond her. Mendieta both appears and disappears throughout her body of
work as she performs exile. To ask where she is, as an artist who has never made
herself “present,” is already to be thrown into exile by the question itself. Blocker
writes, “I am drawn to the question, ‘Where is Ana Mendieta?’ not only because it
interrogates her absence, but also because it reveals the willful refusal to appear as an
act of transgression…The question is thus useful because it points to Mendeita as a
subject produced discursively by questions of location.” (Blocker 3) “Where is Ana
Mendieta?” When we ask this question it is both a question and a citation, it is an
intervention, a cry, a moment of activism, and the title of Jane Blocker’s book. The
question addressed a larger absence, not only Mendieta’s suspicious death but also
the absence of women in spaces of power, the underrepresentation of women,
marginalization of people of color, it becomes a much larger question encasing a
larger body that is silenced.
Rebecca Schneider writes of the political nature of the absent body which is
so central to her work. “Mendieta made explicit the vanishing of her body, at the
same time – the 1970s – that the young white body was the over-abundant site of
representation in the West. The pressure she was under to conform, to Americanize,
was a pressure to disappear, to erase and forget her cultural heritage, or to
commodify it. In a real sense, the pressure was to disappear into disappearance, since
the American woman she was given to emulate was a personification of the
commodity logic of disembodiment itself (the object, fetishized, is not that which it
53
is given to symbolize).”
8
José Esteban Muñoz argues that “what we might be seeing
is the after trail of a vital force that is brownness encountering the actual
multiplicities of studio walls, caves, beaches, fields and other mounds of earth and
world.”
9

Muñoz writes about the affective register of Mendieta’s body of work which
lets her “share the unsharable.” He questions, “What is attempted when one looks
for Ana Mendieta? What does her loss signify in the here and now? More
importantly what comes after loss?” (Muñoz 191). Muñoz is asking about the
afterlife of her death, her afterimage, and the afterimage of loss itself. He reads a life-
affirming drive in her work, thus locating a vitality that is often read by others as a
death-drive. Muñoz writes, “It is the straining of life in the face of various modes of
loss that constitutes the work’s strange intensity. This is to say that through violence,
the straining and making precarious of life, a vitalism emerges and lingers after the
official ontological closure of life itself” (Muñoz 192).
Following the trace of invisibility, Native American performance artist,
Luzene Hill, makes visible the missing narrative within the discourse of sexual assault
which has excluded indigenous voices. The highest percentage of sexual assault
victims are Native American women, and yet these stories are missing, these crimes
lack justice. Hill states, “Silence shrouds the experience of sexual assault.” While she
had previously approached the subject of violence against women as a larger and

8
Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, 119

9
José Esteban Muñoz, “Vitalism’s After-Burn”
54
general concern, Retracing the Trace focuses both on the silenced experience of Native
American women as well as her own personal experience.

Hill writes, “Each aspect reflects my identity and involvement, from making the
body imprint to removing the last cord from the floor and attaching it to the wall.
The gallery is a metaphor for my body, as I draw attention to the number of assaults
that go unreported, and renounce the traces of my own trauma…As a Native
American woman I often reference Pre-Contact culture in my work. The khipu was
pertinent to this work, as a device made of cords, and as an endangered indigenous
language. I metaphorically connected the silencing I experienced when I was rape to
55
the silencing of the Native American culture and voices.”
10

Hill makes visible this missing archive. She beings the performance by laying
on the gallery floor in the center of a mound of red khipu cords. Wearing all black as
though in mourning, she slowly picks up each individual cord and fastens it to the
gallery wall. The visual echoes and traces of Mendieta resonate, the cords on the wall
evoke Body Tracks, and the pose that begins the piece recalls the pose of the Siluetas.
Unlike Mendieta’s siluetas which disappear, Hill resurrects, reconstitutes, and reclaims
the body. This silent piece is both a work of mourning and also an act of testimony.
The Inka khipu cords were a form of record keeping, the knots on the cords used
for accounting. Hill uses this practice to account for the missing voices. There are
3,780 knotted cords, the number of unreported rapes that occur in ever day in the

10
Luzene Hill, Retracing the Trace
56
United States.
11
This piece is many knotted, as it accounts for her own personal
experience, the experience of women in the United States, and more specifically for
Native American women. Hill also explains that the piece is not only about the
silencing and silence of sexual assault victims, but also the “silencing of Native
American culture and voices.” Retracting the Trace is both about the silencing of
women and the silencing of history, two giant holes at the center of the country.
While Hill emphasizes the voices of Native American women and the loss of this
culture, her body of work also addresses a global narrative of violence against
women, not just in the U.S. but also the Democratic Republic of the Congo in her
piece …The Body and the Blood.
Ana Mendieta addressed sexual violence directly in a performance protesting
an unsolved crime, the rape and murder of Sara Ann Otten, a nursing student at the
University of Iowa. Mendieta, who was also a student at the university, was outraged
by the university’s lack of response to the brutal crime. Mendieta performed Untitled
(Rape Scene) and Untitled (Rape Performance) in order to break the school’s silence and
force a confrontation with the reality of sexual assault on all college campuses.
Mendieta speaks for, and in place of, the victim, as she staged her own body in
scenes evoking sexual violence. Like the Silueta series, this performance is untitled,
and its link to the unspeakable is all the clearer for that reason.
In Untitled (Rape Scene), Mendieta invited colleagues to her dorm room where
they found what appeared to be the brutal aftermath of a sexual assault. Upon

11
Luzene Hill, Retracing the Trace
57
entering her room, they saw furniture and objects in disarray and they found
Mendieta slumped over her desk, clothes torn, with blood smeared on her bare legs.
Mendieta used performance not only to speak for the remains of Otten, but to insist
that Otten would in fact remain and not be forgotten. This performance, unlike her
Silueta series, is particularly difficult to witness given its shockingly realistic
presentation. The choice to use a living body in this performance shows that there
are moments when a body must be present, especially when engaging a discourse of
assault where there has been a consistent refusal to look. It is in these moments,
when something is too discomforting, too unsettling, that it is most imperative that
we look and witness. Mendieta stayed perfectly still during the performance and later
noted how she could hear how shocked and disturbed her audience was although she
could not see them. The longer she stayed still, the more unsettled the silence grew,
until the audience finally broke the silence by discussing the assault (Blocker).
Mendieta’s stillness is almost its own character in her pieces, evoking not only
photographs, but also the film still, the still as a continuance, a mark of time, the
“still” of trauma, a trauma that continues, that still happens to you, that keeps
happening to you as it cannot be integrated, but rather keeps interrupting, breaking
through, arriving in pieces, in stills, still.
58

This performance turned viewers into witnesses. It was performed with the
stillness of a photograph, and of a crime scene, putting viewers in touch with the live
gesture of the moment photographed. Roland Barthes states that the punctum can
only be seen in still images because one needs to spend time looking at the image.
The punctum does not immediately reveal itself as it is the unnamable element in a
photograph. Mendieta’s stillness, a character in itself throughout her works, allows
the viewer to see the punctum in live performance. Barthes names the “punctum” as
the element that sticks out of the frame and stings or pierces. In examining
photography throughout his text, he stings, pierces, cuts his body in a repetitive act
of wounding in order to expose what is that he loves about each photograph,
connecting desire with pain and trauma.
In addition to the rape scene, Mendieta also performed Untitled (Rape
Performance). In this piece, she posed throughout the campus as though the body of
Otten was reappearing everywhere. This performance did not allow the remains to
59
disappear, but instead assured their reappearance. Mendieta’s use of photography
further ensures the remains of her performances. Photographs allow the
performances to remain, but not as petrified documents; instead they contain
liveliness in the image, capturing the live performance in a still image. Her
reappearing body haunts the campus with the crime it chose to ignore. The piece is
especially unsettling because she performs as the corpse of a silenced victim, and
because of this, one can surely witness, but it is too late to intercede. The piece
served as a caution, a warning that not all victims live to tell their stories and the
burden is left on us to speak out. This performance arrives on another kind of edge.
If the audience perceives the piece as far too disturbing, there is a risk that it will, in
turn, render it silent and close off any possibility of discourse. But to remove the
presence of violence completely poses another risk, in that it does not insist enough
on the brutality of assault and the urgent need for an active discourse. I name this
the eclipse-effect, the dangerous line that is negotiated when addressing assault and
narratives of trauma. How closely can you see the totality of the sun before it blinds
you and you never look again? Is it a betrayal to cover up, to eclipse the violence and
the horror of violation in order to ensure the audience will take the role of witness?
Or is it on us to look anyway: the harder it is to look, the more we must?
Rebecca Schneider writes about a civil war reenactment where one of the re-
enactors had just returned from Iraq and claimed the reenactment felt more real than
the real war. Reenactments have the potential to create more affect than the original
event, to leave a larger mark and a deeper one. She writes that the war re-enactors,
“fight not only to ‘get it right’ as it was but to get it right as it will be in the future of
60
the archive to which they see themselves contributing” (Schneider 10). Mendieta’s
reenactment is of a crime she did not witness; in fact, it is a reenactment of a crime
which had no witnesses. It is both a reenactment and a construction. It isn’t
necessarily how the crime occurred, but it could be. Muñoz read a life-drive in
Mendieta’s work that is often read instead as a death-drive. This life-affirming aspect
or life-drive is also a concern with the future. Mendieta’s reenactment of Otten’s rape
and murder was not just about justice for Otten, it was also about a larger justice for
victims of gender violence now but also in the future.
Both Abramovic’s and Mendieta’s performances present us with a
visualization of violence, Abamovic’s being real and Mendieta’s recreated. We see
blood in both of these performances; we see brutality done to the female body.
Renee Heberle claims that the visualization of victims and violence is also a
visualization of male power. She questions whether our attempts to insist on the
reality of rape culture and calling attention to rape culture might in fact construct a
narrative that essentially normalizes sexual violence as something expected and
inevitable. We also risk the exploitation of victims and the commodification of
women’s voices and stories. She offers a counter reading, “What if sexual violence
were argued to signify the limits of patriarchy, rather than to represent its totalizing
authority or power over women as a system” (Heberle 67). The shamelessness which
is present and loud in each one of these silent performances of endurance and
survival reinforces the strength of the survivors and the weakness of the patriarchy
as a failed and failing system.
61
Emma Sulkowicz’s The Mattress Performance: Carry That Weight is a
contemporary piece, performed several decades after Mendieta in response to the
same epidemic of sexual assault that universities were still not appropriately
addressing. Sulkowicz was a visual arts student at Columbia University who reported
being raped by another student. The university dismissed the case, and even went so
far as to issue a statement later saying their investigation had been “very difficult” for
Sulkowicz’s alleged rapist. Sulkowicz began her mattress performance as a protest
against the school’s inaction, carrying her mattress around campus everywhere she
went. She never asked for help carrying it, but accepted help if others offered. There
is no spoken element to her performance, she silently carried the remains of her
assault and testified to her survival. In The Mattress Performance: Carry That Weight, the
bed is the evidence and remains of the crime that took place. She refused to let the
crime disappear, forcing everyone to become a witness. She was fighting against
disappearance, against universities that treat sexual assault cases as ephemeral, as
cases that, if ignored, will disappear.
By carrying the mattress in a public space, she altered the space into a
politicized zone of protest. She created a border, and as she moved, the border
shifted with her, redrawing the lines of her mobile crime scene. This mobility made it
more apparent that the scene, the assault, could happen anywhere. The crime scene
thus appeared everywhere that she went, dislodged from her dorm room and
emptied onto the entire campus. It is this act of dislodging that allowed this piece to
speak, to give voice for any assault on any campus, not only her own.

62

There is an ordinariness to her performance, as she carried the mattress while going
about her day, to and from class, to and from meals and errands. It was part of her
daily routine rather than a separate performance. It didn’t require a stage, and unlike
Mendieta’s performance, it did not depend on the presence of an audience. There
was a separation in Mendieta’s work, an isolation of the performing body, whereas
Sulkowicz dissolves this gap.
People were allowed to participate although not directly asked to do so.
Sulkowicz’s performance is silence in motion that calls not only for witnessing, but
also for action. The participatory element of this performance created a strong sense
of community that extended beyond the university, to re-enactments of the mattress
performance in other cities and other schools. One of the most powerful scenes of
the community camaraderie was at her college graduation where her classmates
helped her carry her mattress during the entire ceremony.
63
Mendieta turns the viewer into a witness, but Sulkowicz turns the viewer into
an activist. Sexual assault is too great an issue for many who do not know how they
might be able to help. Sulkowicz’s performance offers the simplicity of lending a
hand, helping to carry, as a start towards activism. It also shifts the spotlight of the
survivor. When looking at the image of Sulkowicz and her peers carrying the
mattress, it is not clear which student is the survivor. It could be any one of the
students, and it could also be all of them.
Like Mendieta’s work, there is a ritualistic aspect to the performance. It
collapses a trauma and protest into everyday practice. Michel de Certeau, in The
Practice of Everyday Life, writes that we all navigate our space according to ghosts and
to a silent past. We always see what used to be there, who used to be there. For
Sulkowicz, the actual crime is over, but it will always haunt her and her dorm room.
Her performance has exorcised her dorm room, but the crime now haunts the entire
university. This performance highlights the limits of the voice. Her testimony was
rendered silent, not to mention the escalation of victim shaming that followed her.
The ripple effect that her performance initiated has become a larger and more
widespread effort to break the silence everywhere it occurs.
Sulkowicz carrying her mattress is nomadic, a wandering exile. She performs
uprooting in the act of walking, tracing, and dispossessing. Sulkowicz’s pilgrimage of
nomadic walking and tracing stained the university. Like Mendieta, it is not from her
body, but through her body that we access the shareable affective gestures and
promises; similarly, it is not from Sulkkowicz’s body, but rather through her body
that the campus becomes marked by her rape, her testimony, and her survival. She
64
lives on, affirms life, and also refuses to forget. Sulkowicz’s piece is easier to witness
than Mendieta’s because Sulkowicz does not recreate the violence and violation of
the trauma she endured, and yet still communicates the suffering through her
enduring performance.
There is a kind of madness and absurdity to carrying a mattress, which
mirrors the madness and absurdity of testifying and being rendered silent. The
burden is that survivors carry an impossible burden to try and convince a legal
system that a crime ever happened in the first place. The mattress performance
signifies carrying dead weight, and a failure in making sense of a justice system that
doesn’t function properly. The visualization of the mattress produces a stoppage that
needs to be addressed as it disrupts the flow of things, and signals that something
isn’t right. The mattress is a refusal to normalize. It is the limp phallus of a
patriarchy, which can no longer sustain itself. As addressed before, sexual violence
has an unspeakable nature, namely that it is difficult to explain one’s experience in
terms that can be understood by a listener. As Elaine Scarry has argued, pain is
inexpressible and incommunicable. Because violence can’t be articulated in
acceptable terms for a legal case, the mattress takes on symbolic weight, a visual
marker of the pain and violence endured. The silence infuses the mattress with
meaning, and becomes an image that can be communicated and understood by
others. In Brison’s terms, this would constitute part of the remaking of the self.
Emma Sulkowicz and Ana Mendieta both turn their bodies into an archival
document. Mendieta used her body to mark and record the event of Otten’s murder,
while Sulkowicz used her as a record of the event. Rebecca Schneider notes that,
65
“American Civil War re-enactors who, often motivated by a distrust of documents,
consider performance as precisely a way of keeping memory alive – making sure it
does not disappear” (Schneider 102). These performances are contemporaneously
creating documentation where documentation had failed. Since documentation is not
synonymous with truth or fact, these works perform the writing and tracing of
testimony. We also place documents into archives so that we no longer need to
remember them. Once they are safely stored, we forget. The repetition of these
performances, like war reenactments, prevents the cultural consciousness from
forgetting. We continually re-witness and re-experience the events as remaining in
the present. Mendieta and Sulkowicz both call attention to the reality and rampant
mishandling of sexual assault on college campuses.
In the last several years, there have been numerous cases of campus assault
that have come to light; among the most high profile of these was the Stanford
University rape of Emily Doe by student Brock Turner. Doe was raped by Turner on
January 17, 2015 as she lay unconscious by a dumpster. There were witnesses. There
was an investigation. Still, justice failed. Doe wrote an impact statement to be read at
the sentencing hearing, detailing how the assault affected her. The statement was
made public on June 3, 2016, and on June 6, 2016, CNN host Ashleigh Banfield took
the first half of her segment to read the entirety of the statement. Banfield could
have read an excerpt or merely referenced the letter, but she insisted on reading
every word. This was also a decision not to silence any part of the statement, to
privilege one detail or one sentence over another. It was also an insistence that the
public listen to the survivor, so that we now know her story and her voice, even if
66
she remained anonymous, and perhaps, especially because of this. The trial Judge,
Aaron Persky, gave Turner a six-month sentence (of which he served three), stating,
"A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him.” Turner’s crime and the
judge’s sentencing and statement transformed everyone watching the news into a
witness, and it became an accusation not only against Turner, but directed toward
Persky, that rape culture and the culture of silence has allowed so many cases to pass
through the courts and into our cultural consciousness so effortlessly. Like
Sulkowicz’s peers in The Mattress Performance: Carry That Weight, Banfield symbolically
carried the burden of the survivor who has chosen to remain anonymous. We can
help to carry the weight of
shame for each other, to hand it over to the perpetrators of violence instead of the
victims.
Emily Doe is an absent presence at the center of conversation and thought.
The mass circulation of Brock Turner’s face is also the mass circulation of her absent
one. Shame is as dynamic and complex as silence is in this conception. The shame
here is twofold, one side on the part of survivors who don’t want to come forward
or do so with the risk of their name being dragged through the mud, and the other
side on the part of the witness. We are all the witness who have discussed rape
culture in a way that normalizes it. As a society, we care more about the cost to the
perpetrator than to the victim. We forget about the stories just as quickly as they
emerge into the public consciousness; in our failure to seek justice or amend the legal
system we have dismissed these cases all too soon. Ashleigh Banfield’s reading of
Emily Doe’s impact statement is an accusation against the public. We don’t look. We
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don’t give these cases the attention and seriousness that they deserve. We have failed
to witness. Doe is an absence that produces presence. We know her story, and we
know her impact statement in all of its detail, but we do not know who she is. She
has escaped the public eye and remained anonymous, even after being named
Woman of the Year in Glamour Magazine. Doe is Barthes’ Winter Garden
Photograph of the current discourse on sexual assault. We do not get to see her
image or know her name, we only have the text and testimony which she provides.
While it can be argued that she has remained anonymous, like so many other
survivors, because of shame, I don’t believe this is the case. Her impact statement is
shameless, and I read her hiding in the same way that Barthes hides the photograph
of his mother. We will misunderstand, we will fail to properly witness, and ultimately,
we will forget her as we have forgotten so many. Is this the only way out of the
shame cycle of rape culture: to visibly remove oneself?
Assault on campus has become much more visible through students speaking
out, as indicated in the 2015 release of the documentary, The Hunting Ground.
Increased visibility and attention to these often repressed and ignored narratives
begins to pull them out of silence and out of shame. Campus assaults aren’t the only
stories that have been surfacing more in recent years. Within popular culture, we
have witnessed the rape accusations of major figures, especially Bill Cosby. Cosby
was accused of drugging and raping numerous women over several decades. The
accusations occurred in 2015, the same year The Hunting Ground was released, the
same year Emily Doe was raped by Brock Turner, and the same year Emma
Sulkowicz graduated and commenced The Mattress Performance: Carry That Weight. On
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July 26, 2015, New York magazine released an issue devoted to the survivors of
Cosby’s years of assault. The cover of the issue depicted every woman who had
come forward to accuse Cosby, each seated in a chair, and then one final, empty
chair. The New York cover photograph captured the totality of these stories in a
single image, and is both powerful and haunting. Schneider writes of the live
potential of photographs, “If we have become somewhat comfortable with the
notion of bodily memory (if not bodily history), and comfortable reading bodies as
engaged in ritual or repeated actions as carriers of collective memory, we are not
entirely comfortable considering gestic acts (re)enacted live to be material trace,
despite the material substance that is the body articulating the act. We do not say that
a gesture is a record, like a photo or written document. We also don’t say, but we
could, that a photo, written testimony, or footprint is a live gesture” (Schneider 39).
This image, although a photograph, although static, is a performance. Its
concern is the future of the past. It expresses time, and suggests that there is a before
and after, that the image likely contains gaps, missing women, women who would
rather remain silent. By leaving the last chair empty, it reads as an ongoing
performance, a violence that continues beyond this frame, beyond this story. The
empty chair could also be for Cosby, in order to allow the women to confront their
attacker as a united front. #TheEmptyChair became a trending hashtag created by
Elon James White in response to the New York cover. It represents the silence, the
deafening and screaming silence that overwhelms the image.

69

On the cover, we see thirty-five seated women photographed in black and
white. The effect of these women seated instead of standing, and together instead of
individually, creates a timeline and tells a story without speaking a word. Does the
seated pose invite one to look longer, to engage differently than a standing pose?
Thinking back to Abramovic’s Rhythm 0, is the seated figure always inviting the
viewer where the standing figure is somehow condemning? To be seated is also to be
rooted. It’s a pause, a stillness, a quiet protest, a patience. To be seated is also to wait.
These women have held their stories in for a long time, they’ve been sitting with this,
and now we are confronted with their testimony and we must sit with it. We sit with
a culture that shames its victims. We perpetuate harmful stereotyping and victim
blaming. We make it incredibly difficult for victims to come forward, forcing them to
70
sit with their shame and silence longer than anyone should. The seated pose also
embodies the tension of silence, a reserve gathering itself to make a move, to say
something, to go somewhere, to unearth, to reclaim, to carve out.
Sulkowicz and Mendieta both focus on the image of one woman. The
singular of course indexes a larger community of victims but this community is
approached one body at a time. The magazine cover overwhelms the viewer with the
startling confrontation of the many instead of one. We see the excess of this crime,
and we see the horror in the excess. We are speechless and we feel chills. Griselda
Pollock writes, “Like so much shaming trauma in the worlds of women today, it
needs to be heard and transformed into a larger question about the necessary
shareability of trauma―generating a real and sustained inability to turn away from the
pain of others.” This cover, and the empty chair especially, ignited a very serious
dialogue and movement to discuss assault, and insisted we feel and listen to the
women’s pain.
Author Kelly Oxford started a Twitter movement as a response to rape
culture rhetoric which surfaced during the 2016 Presidential election cycle. Her
#notokay movement was another way to transfer shame from the survivors onto the
perpetrators of violence to counteract the rape culture that has successfully, up until
then, silenced these stories. She tweeted a request for women to share their first
experience of assault and then shared her own. Millions of women shared stories.
Invisible narratives were finally made visible, transforming the landscape of Twitter
into one of testimony and witness. The movement was like releasing a deep strangled
breath, a catharsis in sharing their story, in being recognized for what they’ve
71
endured, but also a collective sharing, knowing that a platform had been established
for witnessing. Oxford’s movement brought out cases of assault from years and
decades past, triggering stories that some women say they had forgotten or
repressed, and therefore released the women from the burden of silence and dusted
them off from the dark. This is significant. This is worth witnessing. So many assault
stories are from years ago. Survivors are often criticized for not immediately
reporting, as though time is a marker of truth or lies, or anything other than a
measure of how long shame has had to settle into your bones.
However, Oxford’s #notokay movement also eclipsed the full image of
trauma because they were Twitter confessions and testimonies that were bound by
the 140 character limit. How can one condense their first experience of sexual assault
into 140 characters, and how does one choose what to include and what to leave
out? The details? The feelings? Yet, the absurdity of the request mirrors the absurdity
of our culture. We are a culture that quickly forgets and continually fails to witness.
We mistreat our survivors by either stigmatization or sanctification as though there
were such a thing as a perfect victim.
Sulkowicz has continued to explore themes of violence, consent, and
witnessing in her work. In 2015, she released a performance piece online titled,
Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol (This is not a rape). This piece targets the viewer and spectator
not only as witnesses but as participants. The art piece consists of a video shot in a
Columbia dorm room which portrays a sexual encounter between Sulkowicz and a
male student, that appears to begin as consensual but ends as non-consensual. The
title of the piece tells us that this is not a rape, that while it appears to become non-
72
consensual, it is non-consensual in appearance only. Sulkowicz intentionally created
an art piece which is so closely tied to her rape testimony and the circumstances of
her assault that it made it difficult for the viewer to distinguish between the two.
Many read this web performance as a document about her experience, not as a
separate performance. Sulkowicz forces the viewer to release preconceived notions
of discovering truth about her rape through this piece. In Camera Lucida, Barthes
writes that when we point to photography for proof or evidence, the photograph
always points to something else. That is what is happening in this piece; it is not
meant to reveal evidence about her assault, and the more the viewer makes it about
that, the more it is about something else.
I speak of the edge of silence because these pieces are loud, screaming even
in their stillness, closely relating silence and the scream. These works command that
you do not look away, but that you remember. They command a response. There has
not been justice. Those in power have failed. Silence functions as an afterimage that
stays with the viewer in these performances.
The silence we are speaking of is the tangible intangible, the afterimage that
is both before your eyes and beyond your grasp. Highlighting the tension of these
blank spaces allows the viewer to see silence, and allows silence to speak, signify, and
point to its own excess. It must always be appended, hinged to something like the
white background of the New York magazine cover, Sulkowicz’s speaking body
carrying the silent mattress, Mendieta’s live body standing in for the silence of the
dead, surrounded by the living who are summoned to speak.
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Despite this ongoing trend of shaming and silencing, we now witness a
collective unburdening. Stories are coming out; this collective wound is made visible
and are brought to the forefront. Repressed narratives are commanding the
conversation. So the question is whether this will continue. Will we continue having
these conversations, will we keep telling our stories, will we keep this wound visible,
or will we move on to another topic as our cultural amnesia permits us to do so
easily? Sulkowicz, Oxford, Banfield, and many others have shown how we can
redirect the mark of shame we’ve been placing on survivors upon the perpetrators
and culture that have marked and silenced their voices. We still have a long way to go
in removing the stigma of rape survivors since so many are still afraid and ashamed
to come forward. In her recent article in Glamour as one of the chosen Woman of the
Year, an anonymous Stanford assault survivor wrote, “Victims are not victims, not
some fragile, sorrowful aftermath. Victims are survivors, and survivors are going to
be doing a hell of a lot more than surviving.” These words resonate as a call to
action. It was less than two years ago when we were consumed with the stories of
Bill Cosby’s alleged assault survivors. We forget too easily. We let these women who
have the courage to break their silence slip back into silence as they disappear from
the conversation.

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TESTIMONIAL SILENCE

Law is a language of abbreviation, of limitation and totalization. Art is a language of
infinity and of the irreducibility of fragments, a language of embodiment, of
incarnation, and of embodied incantation or endless rhythmic repetition. Because it is
by definition a discipline of limits, law distances the Holocaust; art brings it closer…
Art is what makes silence speak.

–Shoshana Felman (153-4)

No one bears witness for the witness. And yet, always, we choose a companion for
ourselves: not for ourselves, but for something inside us outside us, that needs us to
be lacking for ourselves in order to pass the line we will not reach. Companion lost
in advance, the very loss that is henceforth in our place.
Where can we look for the witness for whom there is no witness?
–Paul Celan

Those who have not lived through the experience will never know; those who have
will never tell; not really, not completely….The past belongs to the dead….

–Elie Wiesel (1975: 314)

If we can read the bodies of performance artists as flesh-speech, can we
apply the same concepts, the same frames, to survivors of trauma called to testify?
What can we make of their silence? In this inquiry into trauma and the unspeakable,
into silence as such, how does this complex web of loss, disappearance, and
mourning interface with the legal system? When testifying before a court, witnesses
of traumatic events must reduce an unimaginable experience not only into words but
into a clear and cohesive narrative. Legal proceedings require language, not silences
and pauses, not ellipses. We have considered several ways of reading the silence of
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trauma survivors, namely focusing on Lyotard’s différend, where he reads their silence
as a failure of language. Lyotard addressed Holocaust deniers who claim that the
silence of survivors is proof that there were no gas chambers. He emphasized that
instead the silence of survivors shows how our language lacks the capacity to express
gas chambers. He claims that the statement alone that “Auschwitz was an
extermination camp” is in itself surrounded by silence. Even with a shared language,
it is beyond expression and understanding. Lyotard cautions us about the impulse to
fill in these silences and construct a narrative. He notes that filling in the silences too
quickly links the victim to the perpetrator and constructs a concise narrative that
betrays the complexity of their silences. But in order to testify before the law, one
must do exactly this: to construct a concise narrative. How does one remain truthful
to infinite horror while being concise?
Elie Wiesel provides an ethics of silence that illustrates why some survivors
chose not to speak, at least at first. Wiesel has stated, “After the war, most of the
survivors did in fact refuse to speak. Some of us wrote, but with a certain severity of
style — brief sentences and understatements. Our guilt derives now from the feeling
that perhaps we should not have spoken at all, especially in the light of some of the
vulgarity that surrounds this theme today. Theologians make theology out of it,
philosophers make philosophy out of it, politicians make politics out of it, JDL
warns ‘Never again.’ The subject has become an instrument to be used. And this I
deeply resent.” Silence here serves as a precaution against language that can be
coopted or weaponized; silence becomes a form resistance. The moment there is
testimony, there is also the possibility of doubt and interrogation, of denial. To allow
76
silence to be as it is without an eventual translation into words or representation
introduces the risk of forgetting. But to write it and speak it and archive it so that it
remains, also consigns it to be forgotten. Perhaps the only way out of this paradox is
through witnessing, reading, and archiving these silences.
We can read the Anita Hill hearings as an illustration of this dilemma. Hill, a
lawyer and professor, chose to speak out about the sexual misconduct of her former
employer, Clarence Thomas, when President George H.W. Bush nominated Thomas
to the Supreme Court. The all-white, all-male panel of senators on the Senate
Judiciary Committee who questioned Hill pestered her with inquiries intended to
paint her as a fabricator, such as “Are you a scorned woman?” and quoting a third
party who referred to Hill’s allegations as “fantasies.” Hill bore up under the
questioning, but it failed to have an impact on the nomination; having chosen to
emerge from her silence, she was badgered back into silence by a group of men.
Peggy Phelan claims the hearings were conducted between psychoanalysis and law,
illustrating the impossibility of trauma testimony as it interfaces with the law. The
law and the courtroom are not equipped to read and interpret sexual trauma;
this would require psychoanalysis. Instead sexual trauma must be presented as
sexual injury before the court, requiring clear proof and evidence of physical harm,
although much of sexual trauma is psychic and emotional harm. The senators’ failure
to hear sexual trauma testimony is the failure to hear anything other than the force of
law itself. This is in the nature of sexual trauma, as Phelan explains, “When the injury
is sexual, it is virtually impossible to separate the empirically verifiable from the
phantasm of the trauma. Sexual trauma tears the fabric of knowledge itself: it is a
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wound in the system of meaning through which the subject knows the world, knows
him or herself. Sexual trauma can perhaps never be fully interpreted, but the tear it
creates may be mended as it is rehearsed, rewritten, revised” (Phelan 95).
Chairing the Antia Hill hearing was Senator Joe Biden. Many have speculated
that Biden's staunch defense of sexual assault victims today born out of guilt to
right the wrong he committed by failing to hear Hill in 1991. Biden was outspoken in
his outrage over Emily Doe's rape at Stanford, speaking openly about his support for
her and her courage and bravery. It's difficult not to see the overperformance of
support as an effort to ease the ghost he might carry from the failed hearing he
led. It’s easier to pledge an allegiance to ghosts than it is to live bodies. Is it possible
that justice is more likely achieved in cases where there is no body? Emily Doe is still
absent, we do not know her name or face but we know her story and her words. Was
Biden’s support for her in fact a case of trying to save a ghost, too late? Hill’s
hearing, in this regard, can be seen as the first, too-early public moment of the
#MeToo movement, although the movement did not address or include her. The
very name of the movement suggests a silent first voice: who is the first “me,” after
which all “me’s” become “me too’s”? The virtual archive of #metoo was preceded
and prefaced by Anita Hill, herself a virtual archive, a televised performance held in
physical space and among physical bodies.
In turn, we can see the early attempts toward justice for Holocaust survivors
as underscoring the breakdown of law in addressing trauma. Both Genocide and
sexual violence survivors are met with doubt and denial. One cannot argue with or
call falsity to silence; one needs language to deny. Silence in this context is a powerful
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resistance. It creates pockets of testimony that cannot be coopted or manipulated.
The trouble with silence is its opacity; because it is not clear what these silences
before the law are communicating or transmitting, they aren’t challenged but rather
discarded entirely, as evidenced by the fact that silences and pauses are rarely
included in court transcripts. Survivors of unspeakable trauma, such as genocide and
sexual violence, are left to speak with a language that is insufficient and cannot touch
the reality of the event. All testimony, as Jacques Derrida writes in Demeure, is
haunted by the possibility of fiction. Derrida reveals the difficulty the law creates for
testimony, namely the necessity for testimony to be translatable. The survivor
testifies to an unsharable event, a singular and exemplary experience, but must
translate this before the law into something sharable and relatable, turning the
exemplary into an example, something that can be repeated and even made
substitutable. Derrida writes, “If testimony thereby became proof, information,
certainty, or archive, it would lose its function as testimony. In order to remain
testimony, it must therefore allow itself to be haunted. It must allow itself to
parasitized by precisely what it excludes from its inner depths, the possibility at least,
of literature” (Derrida 30). The survivor’s speech is already in a difficult bind, and
silence resists: it refuses to submit one’s singular experience into the context of
something that can be commodified, where it will be altered into something else and
made possible for the archive. Testimony depends on the possibility of its being
fiction. It must claim truth but appeals to belief over proof. When the witness
testifies, they are testifying to a secret, to a singular and individual experience that no
one else has witnessed; they are sharing the unsharable. The paradox is that this
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singular and unsharable experience must be repeated and shared. The first person
marks a gap in the witness of testimony. Can silence become a method of closing
that gap, a scrubbed zone, so to speak, where even though trauma cannot be
communicated, it can perhaps be transmitted or depicted? Can we read testimony as
an act of transmission, and where do we place silence within that act?
What is the task that survivors are being called to when testifying before the
law? Survivor and psychoanalyst, Dori Laub, has argued that the Shoah is as “event
without witness”
12
He also makes a distinction between inside and outside-witnesses
where inside-witnesses are the victims and survivors of the Shoah and outside-
witnesses were those who indirectly knew or learned of the events, including Jews
abroad and in the United States. This distinction is another way of understanding
why the task of testimony and the call to witness has produced such resonant
silences. In this model of inside and outside witnesses, the inside witness is the direct
witness to the atrocity experienced and must translate that experience to the outside
witnesses. In order for the inside to relate to the outside, Laub stresses that some
detachment is unavoidable, because one cannot project radical interiority outside
without altering it.
13

12
Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Shoshana
Felman and Dori Laub (80)
13
Agamben addresses this in Remnants of Auschwitz, “The Shoah is an event without
witnesses in the double sense that it is impossible to bear witness to it from the
inside – since no one can bear witness from the inside of death, and there is no voice
for the disappearance of voice – and from the outside – since the ‘outsider’ is by
definition excluded from the event” (Agamben 35)
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Where Laub emphasizes a split between the inside witness and the outside
witness, Charlotte Delbo marks this split within the witnesses themselves between
inside and outside memory. In her last book, Days and Memory, she describes what she
refers to as sense memory [mémoire de sense] and external memory [mémoire externe].
Auschwitz is so deeply etched in my memory that I cannot forget one
moment of it. –So you are living with Auschwitz? –No, I live next to it.
Auschwitz is there, unalterable, precise, but enveloped in the skin of
memory, an impermeable skin that isolates it from my present self. Unlike
the snake’s skin, the skin of memory does not renew itself. Oh, it may harden
further…Alas, I often fear lest it grow thin, crack, and the camp get hold of
me again. Thinking about it makes me tremble with apprehension. They
claim the dying see their whole life pass before their eyes…
Because when I talk to you about Auschwitz, it is not from deep memory my
words issue. They come from external memory, if I may put it that way, from
intellectual memory, the memory connected with thinking processes. Deep
memory preserves sensations, physical imprints. It is the memory of the
senses. For it isn’t words that are swollen with emotional charge.”
14

The memory that emerges from the witnesses in these trials is external memory, as it
has been intellectualized in order to communicate in a court of law. Memory is
partitioned into two skins, although these skins are porous making it possible for
memory to pass through. Lawrence L. Langer writes in the introduction to Delbo’s
Auschwitz and After, that external memory allows us to imagine the thinkable horror,
but sense memory “enables us to approach the unthinkable.”
15
Whereas the snake
sheds its skin, the skin for Delbo remains.
If testimony is haunted by literature, then to invite testimony into a court of
law is to necessarily invite literature. Survivors are expected to tell a story, so to

14
Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory, 2-3
15
Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, xx
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speak. In the case of the Shoah, the trials that followed not only provided a space for
this fiction, albeit unintentionally, they provided a space for the silence that
surrounds and permeates the event. The testimony given at the Nuremberg and
Eichmann Trials are doubly haunted, not just by literature, but also by the dead.
The first testimony given at the Nuremberg Trial was by Abraham Sutzkever,
a Yiddish poet who testified February 27, 1946. He wanted to testify in Yiddish but
his request was denied and he was forced to testify in Russian.
16
Anyone testifying
had to do so in one of the approved “official languages” of the Tribunal which were
English, French, Russian, and German. Because of this, many of the individuals who
testified were limited by the constraints of speaking in another language as they
spoke of things that are already difficult to describe in their own language. In an act
of resistance to the court’s rules, when Sutzkever testified, he refused to sit for the
duration of his testimony. “I told the marshal twice that I did not wish to sit down,
as is ordinarily done. I spoke standing up, as if I were reciting kaddish for the
dead.”
17
Sutzkever later wrote about his state of mind when he testified, he wrote, a
reflection that is as literary as it is haunted, “For two nights, before my appearance, I
couldn’t sleep at all. I saw before me my mother running, naked, across a snowy
field; the warm blood flowing from her riddled body started to drip from the walls of
my room and engulfed me… It is hard for me to compare my feelings. Which is

16
Christian Delage’s, “The Place of the Filmed Witness: From Nuremberg to the
Khmer Rouge” in Cordoza Law Review Vol. 31:4 (1098)
17
Abraham Sutzkever, Mon témoignage au process de Nuremberg, in LES ÉCRIVAINS ET
LA GUERRE 150 (Gilles Rozier trans., 1995)
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stronger, suffering or the desire for vengeance?” (Delage 1099). He was not only
standing in kaddish for all of the dead, but also for his dead.
Sutzkever begins his testimony with eleven seconds of silence. He marks the
courtroom, the moment, and the event, and invokes a separation. This trial therefore
opened not only with the testimony of a poet, but also with a poetic act. Sutzkever
was placed at the top of the witness list by Ilya Ehrenburg, who was not only an
advisor to the Soviet prosecution team, but a poet as well.
18
Philipe Lacou-Labarthe
writes, “the poetic act is catastrophic: an upsetting relation to what is already an
upset, in being, in the direction of no-thingness (the abyss)” (Lacoue-Labarthe 67).
The poetic act is an interruption in representation; it obscures, eludes, and always
offers more than it says. There is excess in its ellipses and blank spaces, in its
economy of language. Sutzkever’s silence is not only poetic, it is a sober reflection of
the importance and impossibility of the task at hand, of the absurdity of translating
into legal language, into an “official” and foreign language far from one’s own
tongue, all of the horror one witnessed in the camps.
His silence was planned: He brought it with him into the courtroom. A trial
which needed to produce words, to produce narrative, was met with an interlocutor
of silence, an interruption of the real. The eleven seconds of silence was a deep
reflection, it held up a mirror to the entire courtroom, it was Silence with a capital S,
in the Wieselian sense.
1
Tellingly, Sutzkever’s eleven second silence was omitted

18
Christian Delage’s, “The Place of the Filmed Witness: From Nuremberg to the
Khmer Rouge” in Cordoza Law Review Vol. 31:4 (1098)
83
from the official transcript although it remains in the recording.
19
Christian Delage
notes, “The official transcript of the session does not mention these eleven blank
seconds. They only exist in the audiovisual recording of the trial. For the researcher
who has immersed himself in the twenty-two volumes of debate, in order to locate
and select a few of the most significant sessions, it is a surprise rich in meaning about
the status and role of a filmed witness. For those who discover the trial via its
audiovisual traces, this silence is an unequaled introduction to what took place in
Nurermberg” (Delage 1098-99).

The Nuremberg Trial was made up of many silences. As mentioned earlier,
only a few official languages were heard and translated, leaving many voices and
many languages silenced. Unlike the Eichmann Trial, which came later, the
Nuremberg Trial also limited survivor testimony, emphasizing facts and
documentation over witness testimony. In addition to these silences, the tribunal
intentionally left rape and sexual violence out of the definition of war crimes as
crimes against humanity.
20
Those on the tribunal believed it would be easier to

19
To listen to the audio recording of Sutkever’s testimony, visit the United States
Holocaust Museum online archive http://resources.ushmm.org/film
20
“The significant implications of the Nuremberg Tribunal for international criminal
justice makes the exclusion of sexual offences in general and sexual offenses against
women in particular from Article 6 of the Charter quite conspicuous. The absence
significantly clouds the Nuremberg's distinguished legacy of facilitating the
augmentation of restrictions on individuals and states during war and of creating the
bedrock for the legal branch of international human rights law.” Hilly Moodrick-Even
Khen* and Alona Hagay-Fre “Silence at the Nuremberg Trials: The International
84
convict on murder and torture than it would be for rape. Sexual abuse and violence
against women in concentration camps was not well documented at first. In recent
years, these initially silent and thin archives have since been researched and
documented more fully. These trials were an opportunity to get everything out and
on the record, to say what had not yet been said so that people would know, so that
the world would know, and yet sexual violence was repressed, silenced still, even in
this space, even before the law. This effort to construct an archive, constructed a
parallel, secret archive, an archive with a hole at its center. Why keep sexual assault
out of this space? Is it because the survivors wanted to leave it out of their
testimony? Is it because the world, the law, the courtroom could not hear it?
American prosecutor Robert Jackson required a “well-documented history” of these
crimes to prove guilt. This is a paradox: the Nazi project sought to destroy all
evidence and erase a people, yet something needed to be produced in the courtroom.
The survivors, themselves documents of these atrocities, were not enough; there had
to be paper documents, evidence, something more concrete to convince the world.
Surzkever’s testimony which began with silence, perhaps, marks all the testimony
that would not be heard during the trials, and especially, the silence for the sexual
assault and violence which was disregarded by the Tribunal. Silence gathers all that’s
been left out, holds it as a silent archive, marking by absence. In many ways, this

Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and Sexual Crimes Against Women in the
Holocaust”

85
trial was an accumulation of silences, and Sutzkever’s eleven second silence at the
beginning of the trial calls on all the silences that have occurred in order for this trial
to take place. Austin Sarat writes in Law and Humanities that silence is the limit where
a legal event becomes cultural.
Sutzkever’s silence was not the last one to bring Holocaust testimony to its
limits. During the Eichmann trial, K-Zetnik’s testimony which culminated in his
collapse, created a silence that stayed with the court. K-Zetnik’s biography provides
insight into the meaning of his testimony. Like Sutzkever, K-Zetnik was a Yiddish
poet before the Shoah, publishing under his given name, Yehiel De-Nur. After the
Shoah, he took the name K-Zetnik, the generic term for a camp inmate, and while he
continued to write, he stated explicitly that he was not a writer. He published several
books under the name K-Zetnik, revealing the horror of life in Auschwitz, that are
often categorized as Holocaust fiction. In 1993, of a copy of his Yiddish book of
poetry, published in 1931, in the National Library of Israel; he stole the book, burned
it, and then sent the burned copy back to the library, requesting that any other
existing copies also be burned, explaining that he had burned the past he lived before
Auschwitz. K-Zetnik claimed that he was born in Auschwitz and rejected the name
and life he lived prior to the camps. Part of his act of survival was to ensure that no
trace of himself prior to the Shoah survived. He himself was the survival of survival,
a ghost with no name, a ghost born from the ashes of the Shoah and the ashes of his
burned book and burned past. Survival is synonymous with destruction; to survive is
to ensure a certain remainder of something that has been destroyed.
K-Zetnik was required to testify under his legal name, Yehiel De-Nur, a
86
name he had left behind. One of the first questions the Attorney General asked was
why he has taken this pseudonym. K-Zetnik answered,
It was not a pen name. I do not regard myself as a writer and a composer of
literary material. This is a chronicle of the planet of Auschwitz. I was there
for about two years. Time there was not like it is here on earth. Every
fraction of a minute there passed on a different scale of time. And the
inhabitants of this planet had no names, they had no parents nor did they
have children. There they did not dress in the way we dress here; they were
not born there and they did not give birth; they breathed according to
different laws of nature; they did not live - nor did they die - according to the
laws of this world. Their name was the number ‘Kazetnik.’

K-Zetnik is taken from the initials of the German Konzentration-Zenter, read in
German as ka and zet.
21
His name is still in Auschwitz, a name that Shoshana Felman
reads as an oath to the dead. She states that in the trial he is torn between his oath to
the living and his oath to the dead, which contributes to his collapse. In order for
testimony to be legally valid, it must be narrated in the past tense. K-Zetnik begins
his testimony in the past tense but then shifts to present tense. In this shift, he
narrates as though he is still in Auschwitz, returning to the trauma of the camps. His
testimony treads the border between legal and literary language before losing ground
completely and falling to silence.
K-Zetnik refers to Auschwitz as “the planet of the ashes” and speaks of how
difficult it is to get from our planet to that planet. Language is the bridge from our
reality to the reality of the Shoah, and language, in this moment, fails. Before K-
Zetnik’s silent collapse, silences were largely unaccounted for in the trial, but
afterwards each silence came to signify meaning. This is one of the most notable

21
Chaim Gouri
87
differences between the Eichmann trial and the Nuremberg trial: The Eichmann trial
made room for the possibility of reading silence. The Eichmann Trial also made
room for survivor testimony, something Nuremberg largely left out. The Eichmann
Trial gave voice to the witnesses.
K-Zetnik and Abraham Sutzkever turn the courtroom into a memorial,
resurrecting the dead through their silence. The event of K-Zetnik’s silence is a
reminder that even in a space of testimony, even where survivors are invited to speak
in great numbers unlike the Nuremberg trial, even then there is a hole at the center
of the courtroom. Welcoming testimony must also mean welcoming silence; the
invitation for survivors to speak is what made this event of silence, this hole of
silence, possible: the outside becoming inside. The more you know, the more you
cannot know. Annette Wieviorka explains that the function of testimony shifts after
Eichmann trial, “Testimony had the status of an archival document…Today the
purpose of testimony is not longer to obtain knowledge. Time has passed and the
historian does not trust a memory in which the past has begun to blur and which has
been enriched by various images since the survivor’s return to freedom. The mission
that has devolved to testimony is no longer to bear witness to inadequately known
events, but to keep them before our eyes. Testimony is to be a means of
transmission to future generations” (Wieviorka, 1994: 24). K-Zetnik collapses the
court into the scrubbed zone, into a zone of indiscernibility. The court couldn’t
continue and didn’t know what to do so the judge called for silence and a recess.
While we speak of breaking silence, this was a silence breaking.
88
Unlike Sutzkever’s silence, K-Zetnik’s silence has been the subject of much
translation and explanation, most notably by Hannah Arendt, Shoshana Felman,
Marianne Hirsch, and Chaim Gouris. Arendt and Gouris both attended the trial and
witnessed his collapse first hand. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt criticizes his
collapse in her chapter entitled, “Evidence and Witnesses.” While many celebrated
the Eichmann Trial for giving survivors the voice that the Nuremberg Trial had
worked hard to limit, Arendt did not share this sentiment. She criticized the
overwhelming number of witnesses almost as a parade and performance of
witnesses. Arendt writes, “As though to prove the point, the prosecution called upon
a writer, well known on both sides of the Atlantic under the name of K-Zetnik–a
slang word for a concentration-camp inmate – as the author of several books on
Auschwitz that dealt with brothels, homosexuals, and other ‘human interest stories.’”
(Arendt 223-24) Arendt’s first insult hurled toward K-Zetnik is dealt by calling him a
“writer,” as though the prosecution called upon fiction, called upon literature, and
literature indeed answered the call.
Her tone throughout is both biting and dismissive, a fascinating tension. She
writes, “He started off, as he had done at many of his public appearances, with an
explanation of his adopted name. It was not a ‘pen name,’ he said. ‘I must carry this
name as long as the world will not awaken after the crucifying of the nation…as
humanity has risen after the crucifixion of one man.’ He continued with a little
excursion into astrology: the star ‘influencing our fate in the same way as the star of
ashes at Auschwitz is there facing our planet, radiating toward our planet.’” (Arendt
224). Her language continues to be dismissive, “a little excursion into astrology,”
89
bearing a similar cadence to “human interest stories.” Through Arendt’s writing it
seems clear that she finds no value in his testimony. What is also clear is that not
only is she familiar with K-Zetnik and his story, but it seems she’s heard him speak
before: “he started off, as he had done at many of his public appearances.” This
familiarity is striking. Arendt is not hearing K-Zetnik for the first time, she is familiar
with him and who he is, and still, she does not know how to read him and moreover
does not care to.
Arendt argues that the trial would have benefited from fewer witness
testimonies as well more thoroughly vetted testimonies. The 90 witnesses were
chosen from an overwhelming number of applicants. Arendt claimed, “How much
wiser it would have been to resist these pressures altogether…and to seek those who
had not volunteered!” (Arendt 223). Arendt obsesses over documentation and
precision to the extent that she values documentation over survivor testimony. In
fact, survivor testimony becomes the least reliable proof or evidence of survivor
testimony. In her critique of K-Zetnik, she mentions that there are other survivors
who have written extensively on their experience and published many books and
who speak regularly sharing their story. She claims that one of these survivors would
have been a better choice. Arendt later on praises a witness who gave a brief and
concise testimony as a model witness. Her final insult is her failure to read his
silence. Throughout the chapter she derides him almost as a disobedient child. In the
moment that prosecutor Gideon Hausner and the judge both attempted to direct a
line of questioning to K-Zetnik before his collapse, Arendt writes, “In response, the
disappointed witness, probably deeply wounded, fainted and answered no more
90
questions” (Arendt 224). Arendt makes no mention of the fact that while he began
his testimony by explaining his name, the court had continued to fail to call him by
his name or that this fainting spell landed him in the hospital. Arendt’s reading that
K-Zetnik didn’t want to answer any further questions also reveals her own resistance
to read any further. If we approach this by finding an inversion or mirroring between
these two, then it seems it is Arendt who is deeply wounded. In fact, Cathy Caruth
argues that Arendt’s blindness in this scene is likely because she is mourning Walter
Benjamin and goes on to claim that Benjamin’s suicide is the silence at the center of
Eichmann in Jerusalem. As readers, we are witnessing the transfer of ghosts.
Poet and journalist Haim Gouri, who also covered the Eichmann Trial, has
exactly the opposite reaction that Arendt does to this event of silence in his book
Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann. Where Arendt invests
nothing in K-Zetnik’s silence, Gouri invests everything. In his chapter, The Planet of
Ashes, he discusses the testimony and subsequent hospitalization of K-Zetnik. After
he fainted, K-Zetnik fell into a coma for several weeks. Both his voice and his body
collapsed. Gouri claims that K-Zetnik’s silence, “in fact…said it all” and that “the
things he added afterward would turn out to be merely superfluous detail” (Gouri
2004: 129). Gouri privileges his silence as revealing truth, and the language that
surrounds it as inessential. Is this not a fetishization of silence? One that lets us or
encourages rather the plucking apart of testimony to remove gems of truth from the
context of the rest like mining for gold?
Shoshana Felman takes perhaps the most in-depth approach to translating
this silence. Felman and Arendt read K-Zetnik’s silence very differently. Arendt read
91
the silence as a dramatic performance lacking sincerity and, in this sense, she read
from the perspective of the law, finding that it is without meaning. She criticized him
for being dramatic and for using silence as a way to evade answering any more
questions. Felman read his silence from the perspective of art, acknowledging a
multiplicity of meaning and signification. In Felman’s writing of the collapse, she
attempted to narrate the silence and to translate it into a legible story. Felman
provided an entire narrative, explaining that he had returned to the camps and was
looking into the eyes of those who were going to their death, exchanging a gaze of
recognition as he promised to be loyal to them, to remember them. Felman was
perhaps narrating what she experienced in his silence. In her narration, she states,
“He’s trying to talk about this moment of exchange of looks that is ungraspable,
where life divides itself from that death. And he relives this looking, and it’s a silent
look, he’s looking into the eyes of those who know that they are going to their
deaths. And they are looking back at him. It’s a moment of human communication
in that silence. He’s trying to say all that, and he relives it as though it were again
taking place right now” (Caruth 335). The prosecutor and judge tried to interrupt
while K-Zetnik exclaims, “I see them! I see them!” in a trance-like state. He doesn’t
appear to register that he’s being addressed. Caruth sees the literary as emerging
when there’s a failure in language to cross the border from Auschwiz to the present
space, as no language exists to explain this passage. (Caruth 336).
When K-Zetnik speaks about the planet of the ashes and the distance from
this planet, is he not speaking of the impossibility of translation? Of the
untranslatability of the planet of the ashes? That the ashes, like cinders, disappear
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and leave no trace. Another way of thinking about this is that the planet of the ashes
is the inside, while the court is outside. Arendt believed legal testimony should
distance from trauma rather than recreate or reenact it. For Arendt, testimony should
be lucid and concise, it should give clarity and direct insight into trauma, not widen
the abyss. But testimony proved to be more performative than anything else,
reenacting the experienced trauma. Is there an inherent performative nature to
trauma?
In Felman’s Juridical Unconscious, she writes, “The fainting that cuts through
the witness’s speech and petrifies his body interrupts the legal process and creates a
moment that is legally traumatic not just for the witness but also chiefly for the court
for the trial. But it is through this breakdown of the legal framework that history
emerges in the courtroom and in the legal body of the witness” (Felman 404-5). The
silence is a wounding of the legal system, a double wound, one which leaves K-
Zetnik in a coma in a hospital and one which breaks the courtroom and reorganizes
the trial.
In K-Zetnik’s books he says he made an oath to the dead to be their
mouthpiece; his name alone testifies to this oath. There is an impossibility in
testifying for the dead. His testimony articulates the impossibility of articulation
which is the essence of the trial. Felman argues “what K-Zetnik wants is not to
prove but to transmit” (Felman 2002: 143). But law requires proof, not transmission.
It is interesting that Felman claims to know K-Zetnik’s intention, to translate nearly
effortlessly this radical gesture of the untranslatable, as though it is clear, as though it
is anything other than a rupture; where we might step back and see that we do not in
93
fact see, hear that we are not in fact hearing, Felman narrates as though he had
transmitted directly to her. Marinne Hirsch discusses this transmission function of
memory, “If the main function of testimony now is not to inform factually but to
transmit affectively, it cannot do so by purely vocal means, whether oral or written.
K-Zetnik’s linguistic breakdown, and the telling nature of his physical collapse,
suggest all that he could not express verbally within the frame and the idiom of the
courtroom.” (Hirsch Spitzer Memory Studies 155).
But how can K-Zetnik’s sudden collapse into silence and into a coma in the
middle of his testimony, elicit such strong convictions in its readers? How is the
meaning so clear to Arendt, Felman, and Gouri? And moreover, why has K-Zetnik’s
silence been subject to more analysis than Sutzkever’s? Arendt criticizes K-Zetnik by
suggesting he collapsed so as to evade further questions. But silence was the answer
to the questions he’d been asked and to all further possible questions. Silence was the
full testimony, the whole truth and nothing but. Whereas Arendt suggests a failure of
the witness, it is perhaps a failure of the questions, questions which were sent in the
wrong direction, to “Mr. Dinoor.” As K-Zetnik made clear, “Mr. Dinoor” no longer
exists. To continue to call on the dead to speak, it is no surprise that K-Zetnik fell as
a corpse. This scene is critical: K-Zetnik is mid-testimony and recalling the horror of
the dead he sees before him, while the judge and the attorney general are attempting
to get his attention by calling a name he had left behind.
Unlike Sutzkever, K-Zetnik was a muselmann. In the camps, the muselmann
was the prisoner who had given up, who had been broken down so thoroughly by
the Nazi machine that they appeared almost as zombies, as a living dead who had
94
lost language and communication. He recalls having been a muselmann shortly
before his collapse:
If I am able to stand before you today and relate the events within that
planet, if I, a fall-out of that planet, am able to be here at this time, then I
believe with perfect faith that this is due to the oath I sworn to them there.
They gave me this strength. This oath was the armour with which I acquired
the supernatural power, so that I should be able, after time - the time of
Auschwitz - the two years when I was a Musselman, to overcome it. For they
left me, they always left me, they were parted from me, and this oath always
appeared in the look of their eyes.
For close on two years they kept on taking leave of me and they always left
me behind. I see them, they are staring at me, I see them, I saw them
standing in the queue...
22

This is perhaps the first testimony of a muselmann, a testimony which is itself nearly
impossible. The muselmann was not expected to survive and even if he survived, he
was mute and could not testify. This moment right before the silence, right before
the collapse, where K-Zetnik recalls having been a muselmann for two years in
Auschwitz, is a significant break. The muselmann, the mute witness, the living dead,
this witness is one that can never testify, and yet, in Jerusalem, a muselmann testified
not only in court but on live television. In this moment, the aporia within the aporia,
the lacuna within the lacuna, a muselmann was in the center of the archive, his
testimony ultimately succumbing to its own impossibility. Levi wrote:
I must repeat: we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses…. We survivors
are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who
by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those
who did, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or
have returned mute, but they are the Muslims, the submerged, the complete
witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They
are the rule, we are the exception…. We who were favored by fate tried, with
more or less wisdom, to recount not only our fate but also that of the

22
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-
adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-068-01.html
95
others, indeed of the drowned; but this was a discourse ‘on behalf of third
parties,’ the story of things seen at close hand, not experienced personally.
The destruction brought to an end, the job completed, was not told by
anyone, just as no one ever returned to describe his own death. Even if they
had paper and pen, the drowned would not have testified because their death
had begun before that of their body. Weeks and months before being
snuffed out, they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, to
compare and express themselves. We speak in their stead, by proxy” (Levi
1989: 83-4)

Agamben responds to this passage of Levi’s in Remnants of Auschwitz, which he wrote
as an archive dedicated to the muselmann and their testimony, “And yet to speak
here of proxy makes no sense; the drowned have nothing to say, nor do they have
instructions or memories to be transmitted…Whoever assumes the charge of bearing
witness in their name knows that he or she must bear witness in the name of the
impossibility of bearing witness. But this alters the value of testimony in a definitive
way; it makes it necessary to look for its meaning in an unexpected area” (Agamben
34).
The muselmann according to Levi and Agamben is the only true witness to
the absolute horror of Auschwitz, but this witness is a mute witness, as the
muselmann has never had a voice, not in the camp and not after. This figure marks a
trauma within a trauma, the absolute limit for trauma, as they cannot testify to their
experience. As Adriana Cavarero wrote, they were the result of a process of
complete dehumanization, and one of the most significant components of this was
that they were broken down into a state of muteness. The muselmann lacked
language, or rather had language taken away from them. Cavarero referred to this as
a silence that was artificially produced. They were the least expected to survive
making their survival an enigma, a punctum. The muselmann is a figure that must be
96
told in the camp he or she was a muselmann. It is a temporary state, as one can
return from it, and return to language. Agamben is especially concerned with silence
as he writes in Remnants of Auschwitz that, while the Shoah is unsayable, it must be
said, and that we must resist the silence that one can default on when attempting to
speak about the Shoah. His fear is that silence can lead to sanctification, and that
there is a threat of the muselmann becoming a concept instead of a discrete figure or
person. His book attempts to give voice to the muselmann as it includes a succession
of testimony from survivors that were muselmanner in the camps. Agamben’s text
ends with their testimony, thus allowing them to have the last word.
The muselmann was described by Jean Améry and Levi as a living corpse,
and Shoshana Felman’s collapse is the illustration of the falling of a corpse. K-Zetnik
returned to the state of the muselmann, unable to register the statements and
questions from the court as he became locked inside his narrative. Felman titles her
chapter on K-Zetnik, “A Ghost in the House of Justice,” calling attention to the
transformation of the courtroom into a haunted space, into a cemetery. Is the ghost
in Felman’s title that of K-Zetnik himself or is it the ghost his silence conjured? The
dead to whom he had promised to testify?
Agamben’s text dedicated to the testimony of the muselmann performs a
similar collapse at the end. He ends his book with the voice of the muselmanner,
wanting to leave them the last word. These testimonies echo the same paradox
witnessed by K-Zetnik’s testimony, namely that the muselmann’s testimony is
supposedly not possible, and yet there is testimony. At the very end of the book,
after pages of muselmann testimony, we come across this phrase, the final words,
97
“[residua desiderantur].” The book ends in another language, in Latin without
translation. It ends with the task and burden placed on the reader to translate, ends
with an invitation to action on the part of the reader and an act of justice and
witnessing. These words translated from Latin read as “the rest are lost.” The phrase
is bracketed, as though the lost are being contained or gathered, entombed even. The
book ends in cinders, an inability to retrieve or name what is gone, only the
possibility of marking its absence. If the last line of the book turns to cinders, does
the entire project of the book become cinders? But aren’t cinders the drive of the
book, to recover what is already gone and to find that it is in fact already gone,
beyond our grasp? The end, “residua desideratur” loses both the language of the
author, and the voice of the muselmann. In the end, there is nothing left; they are
gone.
K-Zetnik’s name is testimony to those who are lost, to the remnants, to the
“residua desiderantur.” His name bears witness to the horror, his name alone is
testimony, a testimony that the court can’t hear or register, treading the border of
literature. Testimony must be literary but cannot succumb to literature. K-Zetnik’s
testimony illustrates this tension and its breaking point. His silence is the testimony
of the muselmann. The Eichmann trial was a mediatized trial, it was recorded and
aired on television. The use of headphones also allowed for live translation of
languages. The collapse of the muselmann was brought into people’s homes, into
their living rooms, the silence extended far beyond the courtroom. Video recording
also means the silence can played and replayed over and over. For Felman, K-
Zetnik’s collapse simultaneously collapses the legal frame. Trial Judge Moshe Landau
98
stated that it was the task of writers and poets to translate the meaning of the
Holocaust. Landau understood the limitations of law. Caruth notes that the
Nuremberg trial excluded all “fragile testimony” whereas the Eichmann trial included
it. This fragile testimony fragilized the courtroom and the legal system.
23
This
testimony which was the testimony of an inside-witness, called to the law’s own
outside as it could not assimilate or contain this silence. Judge Landau’s response to
the testimony in his own courtroom, is to invite literature to read what he cannot.
His silence is not only before the law, but it illuminates the very edge and limitation
of law.
While this project has examined instances of silences, senses of silence,
haunting and loss, Abraham Sutzkever and K-Zetnik both produce silence as a
response to the other, in this case, the court. Jean-Luc Nancy presents us with a
scene of stuttering in address to the Other. Nancy explains the reasoning behind
Borborygmi, the title of a talk he gave. He writes that he was approached to speak of

23
“In fact, by inviting survivors to bear witness, the court seems to have made space
for the fainting episode of K-Zetnik and even perhaps for the possibility that such an
episode might complicate the given understanding of legal evidence. For Felman, it
illustrates the ‘slippage between law and art’: It reflects that unspeakable and
unrepresentable realm that stands outside of legal discourse and that can only be
transmitted through the body language and the non-verbal performance of the
traumatized witness. K-Zetnik’s moment of collapse becomes a paradigm for the
aporia of Holocaust testimony – the necessity and the impossibility of bearing
witness to the ‘planet Auschwitz.’ Its ‘testimonial power…lay precisely in the pathos
– the crying power – of its legal muteness’, (Felman 2002:153) (Hirsch & Spitzer
Memory Studies 154)

99
his experience of being startled by the presence of the Other, resulting in this title,
which contains the babbling and stammering that he expressed.
More and more, I find that each request to speak arouses in me an anxiety –
but also, paradoxically, a need to respond with an inarticulate grunt. As if
each time it became clearer to me that the response, indeed every response,
must lead back to the edge of language, exhausting its semantic resources in
order to let something that it, immediately and materially, the unheard sense
of which we are the harkening, murmur and creak, albeit at the price of any
possibility of identifying this ‘we’ (Nancy 112).

This need to respond to the Other with an “inarticulate grunt” or a silence,
opens up a reading that goes beyond the involuntary response, that a need is
produced, an ethical obligation to produce babble, confusion, and interruption. The
space from where the witness speaks is one of dislocation, of the loss of the language
in the face of the Other.
Jacques Lacan writes of the experience of addressing the Other through
speech and language:
The subject as such is uncertain because he is divided by the effects of
language. Through the effects of speech, the subject always realizes himself
more in the Other, but he is already pursuing there more than half of
himself. He will simply find his desire ever more divided, pulverized, in the
circumscribable metonymy of speech. The effects of language are always
mixed with the fact, which is the basis of the analytic experience, that the
subject is subject only from being subjected to the field of the Other (Lacan
188).

Lacan and Nancy illustrate an always-existing crisis of self and language when
one is asked to speak, and this is all the more troubling when a survivor of trauma is
asked to speak about, and make sense of, the trauma they have witnessed. The
fumbling babble becomes a piercing silence, a break in the line of communication, a
collapse into a universal mother tongue.
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THE REMEMORY OF WORDS

anarchivizing destruction belongs to the process of
archivization and produces the very thing it reduces, on occasion to ashes, and beyond
– Jacques Derrida

Where is the center?
Under the cinders.
–Reb Saleh (Edmond Jàbes The Book of Questions, 360)

We have seen the ways that silence undoes the law, the ways that it makes
visible the limitations of law and of the archive. Through performance we see some
of the ways that silence might remain, that it might provide more openings than
closures. The entirety of the scenes of testimony have been pulling toward poetry.
Silence remains, it echoes. How does literature and specifically poetry contain and
communicate silence? Does silence present a crisis in literature as it does in law? This
chapter will explore Testimonial silence, that is, poetry written by survivors and
contemporaries of survivors, as well as the generation after which has inherited this
memory, what Marianne Hirsch has named postmemory. One can inherit memory,
but can one inherit cinders?
The archive of the Shoah extends beyond the legal and historical archive, and
into other spaces of representation and meaning-making. Literature, cinema, and art
all assumed the task of representing and remembering the horror of the Shoah. The
event of the Holocaust emerged into cultural memory through photography and
cinema, through representation. The task of representing trauma is itself a paradox as
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trauma is against representation. Trauma is an interruption in narrative that resists
understanding. Any attempt at representation necessarily collides with this
problematic. The traumatic narrative is often repressed or fragmented and by its very
nature cannot be witnessed directly. Visualizing trauma manifests this crisis of
representation. To represent trauma, something must be left out, must be silenced in
order to present a cohesive image or text, not unlike the law’s insistence on a
narrative. A traumatic narrative is, after all, still a narrative. The following examples
don’t just represent trauma, they represent silence. By representing silence and
making silence a central language in the narrative, these works do not betray the
impossibility of the task, to speak the unspeakable or to represent that which is
beyond representation. In representing silence, the unspeakable remains unspeakable
and yet we are still able to witness it. This is the ethical demand of silence as I am
conceiving it through trauma: silence as a cinder of language, of words and
expression. It is both before us and beyond our grasp, out of sight, vanishing, and
yet it remains as afterimage. Disappearance makes the cinder possible and also
urgent. The texts in this chapter mark through absence the self-effacing trace,
testimony through silence. Silence makes this possible as absence makes the trace
possible.
Despite, or perhaps in spite of Theodor Adorno’s famous claim that to write
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, many survivors wrote poetry, which, more than
any other genre of literature, engages silence as a language, as a motif, and in this
context, as a visual ghost in every text. Octavio Paz has stated, “Poetic activity is
born of desperation in the face of the impotence of the word and ends in the
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recognition of the omnipotence of silence” (Paz Alternating Current 68). Poetry and
silence are nearly synonymous, the poetic written in and through silence, navigating
absence. As Simon Wiesenthal has articulated, the victims in the Shoah were told,
‘‘None of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the
world will not believe him.” As with legal testimony, poetry and literature was
produced in this same paradox of imagining the unimaginable, that in arriving too
close to the truth, to the center of the horror, as K-Zetnik did, one would lose both
language itself, and any witness.
In his oeuvre, poet and survivor Dan Pagis both addresses silence and also
creates silence. His poem, “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Subway Car,” breaks off
at the end into an abrupt and disorienting silence.

WRITTEN IN PENCIL IN THE SEALED SUBWAY CAR

here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i
24

24
The English translation reads as “other” son, but the Hebrew “hagadol” translates
as “older” son
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Pagis’s poetry appropriates the story of Cain and Abel as an allegory for the
Shoah where Abel represents all of those who perished. Abel was the innocent
brother buried in a field, silent and swallowed by the earth. In Pagis’s poem
“BROTHERS,” he returns to the motif of Cain and Abel:
Cain is dumbstruck. His large hand
gropes in the slaughtered throat in front of him:
where has this silence burst from?

This is not the only poem where Pagis writes of a silence that “bursts.” In Pagis’s
poem “A LESSON IN OBSERVATION” he writes of the world as bursting from
silence, this rupture as a birth.
25
This project has considered silence which is gentle in
its withdrawal, reflective, assertive, accusatory, mourning, withholding, and
disruptive. This bursting silence is a rupture, a silence that can tear through a scene
and disrupt it, not unlike K-Zetnik’s silence.
In his poem “Autobiography,” Pagis writes the autobiography of Abel, but
with the poem’s title he has also instructed the reader to read himself in this poem,
My brother invented murder,
my parents invented grief,
I invented silence.

The last stanza of the poem reads:

When Cain began to multiply on the face of the earth,
I began to multiply in the belly of the earth,
and my strength has long been greater than his.
His legions desert him and go over to me,
and even this is only half a revenge.

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Like many survivors, Pagis didn’t write about the Shoah until much later. His first
books did not approach the subject, and while he is known as a Holocaust poet, he
only wrote a small number of poems directly addressing the Holocaust. Pagis never
shared his personal story. His wife, Ada wrote a memoir after he died where she
discussed how in order to get a glimpse into his silenced testimony, she researched
the testimony of survivors from his hometown.
26
By writing the story of Cain and
Abel, he was able to tell his story without ever having to tell his story. When reading
his poems, one is always reading, in the distance, the secret story of Pagis’s survival.
Poet and survivor, Paul Celan wrote silence in the same language that
produced silence. His writing testified to the fact that something had survived, that
silence had survived. Silence emerges as a language within the very language which
tried to wipe it out. It emerges as a ghost language, haunting the German language.
To read the text in German is also to read the silence within it. Celan forces the
German language to keep and carry the dead it produced, refusing to distance the
language from its destruction, from its aftermath, and the wounds of words. Paul
Celan and K-Zetnik as well as others, left their names behind in the Shoah. The
names they bear, that they write in, that they live in, are a trace, or cinders rather - a
remains of what no longer remains, or who no longer remains. Like Francis Bacon
painting the sensation of horror, Celan used silence to express the horror of the
Shoah. To many of his contemporaries and biographers, Celan was synonymous

26
(Ada Pagis A Sudden Heart 1995: 9, 29, 36–41, 74)” (Tamar Yacobi, 214, “Fiction
and Silence as Testimony: The Rhetoric of Holocaust in Dan Pagis”, Poetics Today
26:2 (Summer 2005). Copyright © 2005 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.
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with silence. Edmond Jàbes was commissioned by the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zesting to write a tribute piece for Paul Celan. The piece he wrote, “The Memory of
Words: How I read Paul Celan,” is a tribute both to Celan and to his silence. The
title itself, “The Memory of Words” evokes several readings. First, it can infer that
words themselves are transmitting a memory. It can also be read as remembering a
time when there were words, as though there are no words left. The singular
“memory” is also striking; the singular memory of the multiplicity of words. Already
in the title, Jàbes simultaneously mourns both language and Celan, as though he
mourns language through Celan.
The text begins with an admission of silence, “I have never spoken of Paul
Celan. I have never written anything on Paul Celan.” Jàbes opens the text with a
renunciation, a distancing, creating a silence at the start of the text, invoking a
silence. The certainty of these claims becomes undone by an uncertainty which
retracts and retreats their force. The text is very short and is riddled with question
marks, hesitations, and poetry. It is insistent and exacting in its uncertainty.
This text is written for a German audience, and Jàbes claims that this is why
he accepted the request, that the opportunity to write for a German audience was
one he could not turn down. Jàbes himself did not speak German. He spoke with
Celan in French and read him in translation. The title, “Memory of Words” is even
more insistent in this context, sent to the German people, who have taken words,
destroyed words, mutated words. It is also to say that the memory lives on, that they
are remembered, and that no one has forgotten these words, this language, this life.
It is not entirely transparent why the invitation to write for German readers in a
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German newspaper is one he couldn’t refuse. Perhaps it was because of his
insistence on exile, his position of exile, from a language always in exile. Jàbes reads
news of the Shoah while in Egypt, then writes of the Shoah while in France, then
speaks with Celan, but never in Celan’s language, never reading him in his own
language, but rather always as a translation. This text is another translation, one last
translation for his friend whom he loves, as though Celan himself gave the invitation.
Jàbes, already a witness by proxy in exile, is now called to witness for a witness. He
speaks the language of his dead friend, mourns Celan in his own tongue, by proxy.
He infuses the text with silence, with Celan himself, resurrecting the body he
mourns, or rather the trace. “The same questioning links us, the same wounded
word.” (Jàbes 217 trans. Pierre Joris) “Une même interrogation nous lie, une même parole
blessée.” “Is it because deep inside himself, he knew, better than any other writer, that
he was an untranslatable author?” (Jàbes trans. Joris 218) “Behind the language of Paul
Celan lies the never extinguished echo of another language (Jàbes 219)”
When Jàbes writes “The Memory of Words” is he in fact writing about cinders?
Celan committed suicide by drowning himself in the Seine at age 49. There is a
strong link between suicide and the self-annihilation of trauma. Celan’s self-
annihilation, the destruction of the self that existed before the Shoah, preceded his
suicide by many years. His work reflects this: Celan wrote in German, in the words,
the language, of still-burning ash. We can think of the cinder, “both in terms of what
‘the text [Feu la cendre] names, for example, the crematoria or genocides by fire…’ and
what is called Cinder by way of a proper name. In witnessing this Cinder in either of
its senses, Derrida claims that ‘we are witnesses of a secret, we are witnesses of
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something we cannot testify to, we attend the catastrophe of memory’ (Derrida Points
392). The cinder, then, marks the place for the proper name, that is to say, the
advent of the proper name’s future as something that has undergone destruction by
fire” (Rapaport 79). The cinder, for both Derrida and Rappaport, represents a
memory that has been reduced to nothingness, to no memory: “The cinder is the
interminable trait and the remainder of trauma, a suicide or termination that
celebrates the nothing of the all, its destruction without return. The cinder marks the
trait of the end of mourning, the openness of a future in which mourning and all its
apparatuses are annihilated, effaced from memory, and, as such, made inaccessible to
witnessing and to history” (Rapaport 79). Rapaport is claiming that the silence of the
cinder is terminal, that it escapes our ability to sense and feel. “One cannot mourn
the cinder. And one cannot lay claim to its trauma.” (Rapaport 80) Derrida, in the
text to which Rapaport refers, names this “the forgetting of forgetting”: “The
experience of cinders is the experience not only of forgetting, but of the forgetting of
forgetting, of the forgetting of which nothing remains. This, then, is the worst and, at
the same time, it is a benediction. Both at once” (Derrida Points 207). But what if
cinders, too had an afterimage, could be transmitted, so to speak, from generation to
generation. Toni Morrison’s conception of rememory in Beloved conceives of the
afterimage of cinders, “If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture
of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.” (Morrison
43) Is not Celan’s poetry itself a rememory, the image of a cinder?
Like Celan, Jabès’s own writing was consumed with silence. In The Book of Questions,
he explores the falling silent of language after Auschwitz. His book performs anguish
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and exile, it speaks the unspeakable as it is written in a language of gaps, blanks,
silences, and screams. In this book, language itself is a wound, one which widens at
every attempt to heal it. Both silence and the scream become characters in his book,
the two radical ends of language, which at their own limits, carry us through the story
of survival. The writings of Jàbes are consumed in Auschwitz, his entire oeuvre a
mourner’s kaddish, an archive of silence. For Jàbes, the white space and the silence
are the space of the ghosts, the dead who are unnamed and unknown but
remembered, memorialized in the blank of the page, given an archive, a proper
burial, a promise of memory. The archive is always a promise of memory that also
consigns objects to be forgotten. Paul Auster argues, “To Jàbes, nothing can be
written about the Holocaust unless writing itself is first put into question.” Perhaps
“reclassify” might be more apt than putting it into question. Writing becomes
something else, just as language has become something else. Language after
Auschwitz bears all the impossibility of communicating and translating what has
happened. It is full of holes.
For Jàbes, silence has a color, it can be seen and visualized, as he writes in his
introduction to The Book of Margins, “The color of silence is white.” We can speak not
just the sound of silence, but of its the color. Silence is not an absence, it is what
Rosmarie Waldrop refers to as a “lavish absence.” It is present, it is full, it must be
witnessed. Jàbes doesn’t let us miss the silence; we are not permitted the luxury of
ignorance. Because silence is so foregrounded and highlighted throughout his
oeuvre, it is the first thing we witness and address. In a letter to Didier Cahen,
Derrida recalls his experience and first impression upon reading The Book of Questions,
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and the first thing he addresses is the book’s silence, “There was already in this first
reading a certain experience of apophatic silence, of absence, the desert, paths
opened up of all the beaten tracks, deported memory––in short, mourning, every
possible mourning” (Derrida The Work of Mourning, 122). Jàbes writes in a way that
makes the wound visible, makes silence visible. Is the wound then a placeholder, like
the differend? We believe in the fiction of idioms and language and forget something
is missing; we write language in a way that smooths over the wound, covers it, hides
it, bandages it, but there is something unspeakable that is beyond language. Jàbes
uses writing to bring silence and screams to the center, to call attention to the
bandaged wound, to uncover it and let it be a language of its own. As he wrote in a
letter to Derrida, “You have often explained [difference]. It destroys and creates a
space where everything is canceled as it faces, as it opens to, its potential difference
by deferring it…So the space created by difference is at the same time a space for
leaving traces.”
Paul Aster argues that Jàbes treats literature and the Holocaust as one and
the same. Marie Blanchot speaks to the futility of attempting to represent the
Holocaust through literature, “How to philosophize, how to write, remembering
Auschwitz, remembering those who told us, sometimes in notes buried near the
crematoria: know what has taken place, do not forget, but at the same time know
that you will never know.” But Jàbes suggests that literature after the Shoah can’t
help but carry with it traces of the Shoah, literature is as inexorably stained by the
memory of the event as is history “As from the night’s abyss the stars emerge, man
in the second half of the twentieth century is born from the ashes of Auschwitz.” He
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suggests a permanence of oblivion: “What is remembered makes it all the more clear
what has been forgotten” (Stammelman 268).
Jàbes absorbs silence, absorbs Auschwitz from a distance into language so
that language cannot help but write while also transmitting that silence. Language
after Shoah can’t help but transmit the Shoah, or elements of it. One gets the sense
when reading Jàbes that there are words that are held back in the white void, in the
wound - words that the wound has not yet released, or words that it has taken back
before we can get to them. The wound, the white blank is a space of memory, the
impossibly present absence of memory. Jàbes begins The Book of Questions with what
he names “the threshold of the book,” and a statement from a fictional rabbi telling
the reader to mark the first page with red because, “in the beginning, the wound is
invisible.” This absence at the beginning, this wounded silence, can also be read as an
echo of Sutzkever’s silence. In The Book of Margins, Jàbes writes, “read the blank,”
thus calling our attention to what we ignore as background, and what we visually
silence as being central to the text. Archives make us accountable, and Jàbes is asking
us to be accountable to this silence, this blank.
Craig Dworkin’s No Medium investigates the blanks and margins of the page
as content themselves. Dworkin writes that the margins are where the reader
interacts with the book, thumbing and turning pages and handling of the text at the
margins. “Reserved for the activities of the reader’s body, the frame around the text
block further encourages the reader’s active participation by providing an uninked
space idea for writing entries keyed to particular pages. The margin of the page
invites a written record of the ongoing dialogue that constitutes reading” (Dworkin
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39-40). The margin is reserved for the body of the reader, the border between the
reader’s hands and the text, a meeting of two bodies as it were. The etymology of
margin comes from the Latin margo meaning border or edge. “Moreover, from the
very beginning the margin has always harbored a sense of writing; the word
ultimately derives from the same Indo-European base as mark, relating the margin
not only to boundaries but also to traces, inscriptions, and memorials” (Dworkin 40).
When language fails and memory can’t be articulated, the gaps and silences
hold on to what they’ve lost and become stored in the blank spaces. Jàbes is writing
language out of the wound, calling attention to the white of the page itself as an
invisible wound. He writes over the wound with all of the interruption, paradox, and
impossibility of narrating trauma, a narration that arrives in pieces. The white
becomes the “residua desiderantur,” as Agamben writes; the rest are lost. The white
is what is still in Auschwitz, the Planet of the Ashes. In Rabelais’ Pantegruel, a
battleground is covered in snow and ice, and when the ice thaws, it releases
incomprehensible sounds from battle. Jabes’s text, or at least parts of it, read like this
passage. The white wound is releasing these fragments, shrapnel in the form of
words, directly from the void’s reserve, from its memory. It has not been translated
or made legible.
Authority and control collapse when language is wounded. Jàbes even says,
“The writer is nobody.” Waldrop writes as though he is preparing us for his absence.
Similarly, in Jàbes, we read an effacement of the writer. As soon as the writer
presents himself, he returns quickly to absence.
1
The Books of Questions plays with this
idea, as we have a story which is told by a multiplicity of voices and silences, each
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one a momentary author, no holistic author to be traced, even though we know the
author is Jàbes. He relinquishes the role of author to the language itself which tells
the story, making it difficult if one were to look for Jàbes (and we do), to find him.
The entire text is marked by the author’s absence, Jàbes as author again in exile. And
the author is not the only absence in the text. Jàbes never names “Auschwitz” or the
Shoah in his Book of Questions, and yet we read the text as being entirely about the
Shoah. In Derrida’s Yad VaShem interview, he addresses the reasons why he did not
name Auschwitz or the Shoah in his text Survivre,
Why I did not name Auschwitz in this text (but I did name it elsewhere, ah
well). It is because, as I've said in the beginning, I wouldn't like and I don't feel I
have the right to give a single proper name to all genocide, to all possible
extermination, and even to the extermination of Jews under Nazism”
(Derrida 21-22)
Derrida argues that the name Auschwitz is invoked too easily and often to absolve
their conscience; it becomes a label to be thrown at any atrocity, a parallel made
which also ends discussion and further thinking. Derrida feels that we must resist
this. This echoes Elie Wiesel’s concern that we do not use the word Holocaust
seriously; Wiesel says it is a word that we should take off our shoes before it. Derrida
says, “I don't use this word except in a serious manner, when I think it is necessary”
(21). It has too easily become a blanket term to cover up any human rights violation,
any egregious act of violence, and any atrocity. Because of this, it is a term that is
used, turned into a tool for understanding something else, or not even understanding
but merely labeling something else. It does a disservice to the survivors of the Shoah
and any thinking of the Shoah.
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Derrida’s Paper Machine also explores this idea of the blind spot, addressing
what we cannot see. In this text, Derrida explores the meaning of the loss of paper in
the face of digital technology. Derrida turns our gaze from the content of paper to
the form itself, asking us to look at what we do not see. We often ignore the
medium, the noise, the frame, because the content is what we value and where we
see meaning. Derrida asks us to read against our reading and to see the frame, the
paper itself, as a production of selfhood. He reads paper in a similar way as
Benjamin’s aura, where it is the space of human imprinting, of human essence and
subjectivity. The loss of paper is not only the loss of a medium, but also the loss of
the production of a certain type of subjecthood. In Derrida’s chapter, “Paper or
Me,” he calls attention to the materiality of paper, the white page as a space of
memory, subject formation, collective consciousness, and history. He writes that the
body of paper has a bodily hold on us. The body of paper in Jàbes’s writing is
literally a body. The white page is a spectral narrator, an infinite desert. It is the
camps, the space of exile, the mass graves. The white page is a silent narrator, the
silenced voice against which testimony is made possible:
This body of paper has a bodily hold on us. Because if we hold to paper and
will do for a long time to come if it gets hold of us bodily and through every sense
and through every fantasy this is because its economy has always been more than
that of the medium of a straightforward means of communication the supposedly
trolley of a support but also paradoxically and your question suggests this that of a
multimedia it has always been so already virtually” (Derrida, Paper Machine 40).
Derrida goes on, “Isn't paper always in the process of “disappearing” – dying out –
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and hasn't always been? Passed away, don't we mourn it at the very moment when
we entrust it with mourning’s nostalgic signs and make it disappear beneath ink,
tears, and the sweat of this labor, a labor of writing that is always a work of morning
and loss of the body?” (Derrida Paper Machine, 50).
Indeed, the persistence of writing, speaking, and creating about the Holocaust insist
on an afterlife of the cinder, on a survival of destruction. Fiction can serve as
testimony for the second generation or the generation after, the generation of
postmemory. The term “absent memory” is particularly fascinating, as though one
possesses the absence, as though the memory is just in hiding or has evacuated for
this reason or that. The second generation (and third and fourth) has a compulsion
to testify, a need to impart these stories and testimony even though they were not
theirs. But isn’t it theirs? For whose else is it? So much testimony came decades after
the Holocaust: many survivors didn’t speak about it until the 80’s and 90’s. If
testimony can wait that long, can’t it be sustained into another generation, and
another? And can fiction, media, cinema, film, theater, art, play a part in this
sustaining? The role of cinema and television is undeniable in raising interest and
awareness about the Holocaust. It wasn’t through the survivor testimony, the
Nuremberg Trial or the Eichmann trial, it wasn’t David Boder recording the voices
of the survivors, it wasn’t the establishment of the Fortunoff Archives in the 1970’s
by Dori Laub and Geoffrey Hartman - it was cinema and television in the 80’s and
subsequently the 90’s with Schindler’s List
27
and the establishment of the Shoah

27
My emphasis of Schindler’s List is based on the many testimonies in the Shoah
Foundation Archive where the survivors themselves have stressed the importance of
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Foundation which followed that ultimately brought the Shoah to the world’s
attention, that opened a space for speaking and testifying en masse. Our Holocaust
memory, our collective Holocaust memory is something we have come to, have
accessed, through the screen, the screen of television and cinema. This fact is
appropriately psychoanalytic: a need for mediation of horror, of a way in to the
abyss, to the truth of the reality. The screen and screen memories, come to an
archive by way of another archive. This reveals a cryptonomy of memory, accessing
one body of memory through the body of another. The role of media is critical to
Holocaust memory and study, and its evolution is tied inextricably with the evolution
of Holocaust memory: from Boder’s voice recordings, to photography, to video
recording, to digital archivization, to television, and eventually, to holograms. In this
sense, it seems logical that the future of Holocaust testimony is the hologram, at least
until there is a new model that will replace it. Holocaust testimony was launched in
media; photography testified before there was testimony; technology was there from
the beginning as recorder, as witness, as archive, as testimony. Since this collective
memory emerged on a larger scale in the 90’s especially, one could say that

the film. Some have expressed that if it weren’t for the film, American Jews would
not know much about the Shoah or even have much interest. One survivor, in
recounting a difficult memory from the Warsaw ghetto, went silent after telling the
story, and then broke his silence by stating “this would’ve been something for
Schindler’s film.” His recounting of his own memory was already filtered through his
watching of the film. I am interested in why Schindler’s List resonated with survivors
in a way that all of the Holocaust films that came before it did not. In my next
project, I will be addressing Schindler’s List in the context of the history of Holocaust
cinema with an emphasis on Péter Forgács’ The Maestrom-A Family Chronicle (2008),
Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1956), Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) as well as
others.
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Holocaust collective memory really crystallized in the period of postmemory, that the
two emerged simultaneously, the ghost and its offspring.
Marianne Hirsch writes, “The work of postmemory defines the familial
inheritance and transmission of cultural trauma. The children of victims, survivors,
witnesses, or perpetrators have different experiences of postmemory, even though
they share the familial ties that facilitate intergenerational identification” (Hirsch,
“Surviving Images”, 9). She notes the many postmemorial authors who use “image-
texts,” most notably Spiegelman, but Foer as well. Why do the postmemory
generation, the generation after, turn to image? Spiegelman’s comic style
postmemorial literature is iconic and has been included as required reading in many
schools. In the same comic style, though a lesser known work, is artist Judy
Chicago’s Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light. This is also an image-text but one
that tells the story of sexual violence and rape in the Shoah, the often silenced and
untold story. Chicago partnered with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman,
on this project which became an eight-year investigation into Holocaust testimony
and history. While Chicago and Woodman are both Jewish, they were largely
unaware of their own family histories and connections to the Shoah. Like many in
the generation after, they were fueled by that silence to go in search of these missing
stories. Chicago was partially driven to create this work because she saw a lack of
Holocaust-related art being created. People outside the Jewish community were
largely disinterested. “This is reflected in the art world, where, with rare exceptions,
there are almost no major bodies of contemporary art about the Holocaust; certainly
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few that have grown out of the Jewish experience have successfully entered the
mainstream of contemporary art. The art that is valued and preserved is ultimately a
measure of what we as a society deem important. When there is an absence of
images in our museums, it means that those human experiences that aren’t imaged
exist of what we (often unquestioningly) assume to be ‘universal.’ I have frequently
been attracted to iconographic voids, and addressing them has been one of the
hallmarks of my work.” (4) Chicago professes to being attracted to silence,
responding to silence, to bearing a responsibility to silence to respond to the
“iconographic void.”
Chicago and Woodman’s project which took place from 1985 until its
publication in 1993, was both a book and an art installation as well as the first
artwork to break the silence of sexual abuse in the Holocaust. As a key figure in
feminist art history, it seems appropriate that Chicago would be the one to break this
silence and this ground in both the art world and in Holocaust memory. The project
combined painting and archival photography, as Chicago painted in the missing
pieces that had been omitted or erased from Holocaust history. One panel titled,
Double Jeopardy depicts the rape of women by soldiers modeled after Peter Paul
Rubens Rape of the Sabine Women (1639) painting atop a well-known photograph of
the liberation at Buchenwald. Chicago rescues this scrubbed zone within the
historical archive, the testimonies that were kept secret out of shame or told but met
with silence because they are too horrible to bear.
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Several of the panels incorporate the scrubbed zone into the aesthetic. When
viewed from either the left or the right side, one can see a clear image, but when
viewed head on, the image is fractured and fragmented. Each panel includes
questions on the bottom, when viewed head on, the question is clear but the image is
fractured, and when viewed from the side, the images are clear but the questions are
fractured. Witnessing these images is witnessing between the word and the image,
finding that there is not clear link between the two, and the one will not give
meaning to the other.

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When examining the central fragmented image, the vertical ruptures
throughout the image seem to echo the signature vertical lines of Bacon’s paintings.

Holocaust memory began as voice and words - the forgotten audio
recordings of David Boder - but then emerged in the Eichmann and Nuremberg
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Trials, news articles, and survivors publishing their stories early on. Later memory
came as image, as films, as postmemory works and image-texts. It took cinema and
television to really bring Holocaust memory into the collective consciousness in a
significant way, a popular memory of the Shoah forming as a response to the
iconographic void that existed not just in art, but in culture at large. Claude
Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour film Shoah foregrounded both survivor’s words
and their silences. Lanzmann insisted on not using archival footage, but rather telling
the story through interviews, giving special focus on interviewing
sonderkommandos, the prisoners who were conscripted to work in the death camps.
In his interviews, Lanzmann asked the interviewees to re-enact certain memories,
focusing on bodily memory. For instance, his interview with Abraham Bomba, who
cut women’s hair inside the gas chamber in Treblinka, took place while Bomba was
cutting a client’s hair in Tel Aviv, where he worked as a barber. Lanzmann pushes
him to recall how he felt. Bomba goes silent with the camera focusing on him, and
tears begin rolling down his face. Lanzmann later said “the tears of Bomba are worth
gold.” “The ultimate truth, he implies, the ultimate act of witness, comes from inside
the gas chamber and from the mute testimony of memory emerging from the
body…He can tell the story in the film, but he can powerfully transmit it through his
moments of silence and through his hand gestures and tears” (Hirsch 158).
Lanzmann invests silence with truth telling, similar to Gouri in the context of K-
Zetnik: silence tells it all.
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Silence allows for transmission of memory while words allow for
comprehension of memory. We know how to catalog and archive words, but where
do we place these silences? How do we call and recall them? From where? Survivor
Erika Jacoby claimed that while she never talked about the Shoah with her children,
that they knew her story because they had absorbed it through her silence.
Postmemory is often absorbed through silence. How can we be so haunted by
something that our parents and grandparents never really spoke about? The silence is
perhaps what haunts, what drives the need to know and to search for answers.
Jonathan Safran Foer has come perhaps the closest to defining the
relationship between memory and postmemory. Like Jàbes, he approaches the
problem as one of making blanks speak. But he takes another approach to exposing
the support of the page while excavating a haunted past and fractured memory. Foer
constructed an erasure book out of Polish writer Bruno Schultz’s 1934 book of short
stories, The Street of Crocodiles. Much of Schulz’s oeuvre was lost in the Shoah, and
Schulz perished in 1942 when he was shot by a Nazi on a street corner of the
hometown he lovingly memorialized. Foer wrote of this erasure project, “For years I
wanted to create a die-cut book by erasure, a book whose meaning was exhumed
from another book... I was in search of a text whose erasure would somehow be a
continuation of its creation” (Foer 138). Foer treats erasure as the recovery and
constitution of a body instead of the loss of that body. Erasure is always performing
disappearance, but Foer simultaneously makes another body and another text
emerge, a shadow text, a lost manuscript, perhaps. In The Tree of Codes, a work of
literature becomes a series of poems, vignettes, and fragments. A whole becomes
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pieces; it becomes infinite; it becomes sculpture, poetry, a living memorial. One text
produces multiple texts. Turning each page, one can literally see all the way down to
the bottom of the text. The text creates the feeling of looking into an archaeological
dig as each page gives the experience of closely examining an artifact on the way
down. Trying to read all of the text yields incomprehensible nonsense, but to read
each page is to read a perfectly encapsulated poem. You cannot read an individual
“page” without also registering all of the other pages and all of the blank pages on
the other side. Each page is a delicate cutout, giving the reader a sense of fragility to
the text, and forcing the reader to be aware of their own frail body that can be easily
ripped. Handling the text is another layer of reading, because it is also an act of
taking care, of caring for each page. The white cutout pages on the left appear as an
eerie ghostly text, both cutout and also completely blank. One wonders if words
have been removed or if blanks have been carved out of an already blank canvas, as
an erasure of erasure.
There are many ways to approach erasure; in visual art notable examples are
works from Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, and Andre Breton. These
artists literally erased other works using erasers, intentionally leaving traces behind.
In another approach to erasure, Gerhard Richter’s Birkenau “erases” photographs by
painting over them and effectively burying them. The 2014 series depicts four
paintings which are painted onto the four photographs taken both inside and outside
crematorium V. The photographs were taken in secret by a Jewish prisoner in the
Birkenau death camp and later smuggled out. These photographs were the subject of
Georges Didi-Huberman’s Images in Spite of All. These photographs survived against
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all odds, so why does Richter paint layers and layers of abstraction over the
photographs so that they cannot be recognized. This is another form of silence and
erasure, painting silence over silence, painting horror over horror.
As though the photographs were not revealing enough of the horror, Richter
magnified it. James E. Young has written extensively about the fine line between
witnessing images of atrocity and consuming those images as commodities. Richter’s
defacement in a sense, or re-facement, displacing the face, can be seen as a way to
prevent the consumption or pleasurable viewing of these photographs. In a sense, to
protect the image, to protect the victims, they are obscured, hidden from us, beneath
layers of abstraction. As Wiesel expressed, silence is being used here to preserve the
truth. Is this not what Barthes does with the photograph of his mother? He shows us
by keeping it from us. What we see in this startlingly chilling series, is that we want to
see. We are searching for the photographs, searching for the scenes of Birkenau, and
we are forced to confront our own desire to see.
Foer’s choice to implement the die-cut erasure technique is a more extreme use of
erasure as it requires a rearranging of the original text. Because the text is cut out
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instead of written over or erased, the back page must be blank. The whole text
therefore must be reprinted so that only one side of each page contains text. In
addition, the cutting out of the text creates a fragile document, one that can be torn
and can easily snag in the reading process. Each cut out is like a cenotaph, an empty
tomb. The reader follows the holes all the way to the end of the book, following the
empty graves, the missing words, tracing absence on every page. One follows the
cenotpahs in search of the missing author. The whole of the text is full of small
cenotaphs collected in a mass grave. The act of reading, then, is one of reading
absence, of reading the missing body of the text and the missing bodies it evokes.
These two two texts are read simultaneously, the living and the dead, as though it’s
performing the violence of memory. Is what Foer does with Street of Crocodiles in his
Tree of Codes, a memorial? A love letter? Is it post-memory testimony? There is a
violence to the die cut erasure, and it can be argued that all erasures are, if not a kind
of violence, at least in conversation with violence. To take a knife, so to speak, to a
document that survived the camps, in an effort to preserve, raises questions about
memory and the act of memorializing.
Tree of Codes is also a cut-piece, like Ono’s performance where the audience
cuts into the artist’s clothes to create the piece and the literal pieces. Foer as reader
of Schulz, cuts into his text to produce his own cut piece. And what became of the
missing pieces of text, were they sacrificial petals, or swallowed up in the blanks?
Julia Bryan Wilson emphasized reading the cuttings in Cut Piece as a “gift, a gesture
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of reparation, or a ritual of remembrance”
28
For Bryan-Wilson, Cut Piece is
simultaneously violent and generous, and a reading of one should not eclipse the
other as they are both present throughout the performance. Similarly, Foer’s text
commits a violence against the original text, one which is intended to offer a new
gift. The violence of this gift speaks to Derrida’s notion of the gift, “such violence
may be considered the very condition of the gift”

The figure of the “missing” haunts this text from every corner, every angle,
and every word present and absent. The figure, the absent text, not only produces an
absence, but also mourns and archives the missing texts of Schultz that were
destroyed in the Shoah. Absence here is also a preservation; a preservation of
absence. When taking in the full text, words overlap each other. It is a challenge to

28
“Remembering yoko Ono’s Cut Piece” Julia Bryan-Wilson
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read each page as the reader can see right through it to the next. The only page
which is easily and clearly read is the very last page. It is as though throughout the
course of the book, one is reading through noise, decoding, fighting against ghosts,
distractions, and pasts in order to focus on the present words; constantly confronting
the past and the future simultaneously, until the very last page, when the noise is
gone and one feels as though one can take a deep breath, as though an end has
come. The first page of the text is completely blank: There are no words, just
whitespace. We begin with silence - a silent page. The text is Jàbesian: Jàbes says that
we need to mark the first page so that in the beginning the wound is made visible;
that we will not agree on images until the last one, which will be blank. The blank for
Jàbes is a coming together, a collecting, a gathering, a beginning. It is powerful that
Foer does a cut out of a blank page, carving into an already blank page in order to
scoop out another buried, or hidden, blank. This process exposes the layers of the
blank page, the reserve which it holds, or as Derrida writes in Paper Machine, the
parergon, the outside/inside which is the blank page of any text.
Contemporary poet Jennifer Tamayo took another approach to erasures. In
homage to Ana Mendieta, and answering the call of the Guerilla Girls that has
continued to echo, Where is Ana Mendieta? Tomayo created erasure poems out of the
catalog of Mendieta’s husband, Carl Andre, in an effort to relocate her name and her
image in his text in a piece titled, “Somehow Gone out the Window”: Erasures for Carl
Andre on the Anniversary of Ana Mendieta’s Death. These poems are powerful and
haunting; several are textual erasures which outline the Silueta figure. Tamayo states,
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“I couldn’t find Ana Mendieta so I dug her up from a language that had worked hard
to obscure her.”
29

Where is Ana Mendieta? Where do we look for the missing? The question of
location and Ana Mendieta is more layered as her body was not missing, yet her

29
http://thefanzine.com/somehow-gone-out-the-window-erasures-for-carl-andre-
on-the-anniversary-of-ana-mendietas-death/
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signifier eludes us still. Where have we misplaced her? What has been done to her
memory? Where do we go to find her? While there is postmemorial literature, there
is no memorial literature. What comes after comes after an absence? How can we be
post what we have not properly mourned?

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THE SURVIVAL OF SURVIVAL

Every image from the past that is not recognized by
the present as one of its own concerns, threatens to disappear irretrievably

– Walter Benjamin

one always runs the risk of losing what one keeps and of
forgetting precisely where memory is objectivized in acts of consignment, in objective places

– Jacques Derrida

We are so much better at forgetting than remembering.
How seductively the present lays its pungent, voluptuous
Hand on us, tempting us with narcissistic pleasures, and, as
Nietzsche and Freud have warned, weaning us away from the
frailer touch of ghosts.
What do we do with the dead?
What do we do with the past?
Our own and that of the world around us?

– Ellen Handler Spitz

The question of what survives after trauma has been taken up by many
authors and scholars, but none as hauntingly profound as Edgar Allen Poe in his
story, The Man That Was Used Up. The story begins with confusion as the narrator
struggles to recall when he first met the hero of the story, Brevet Brigadier General
John A.B.C. Smith. The narrator is simultaneously uncertain and certain. He writes
enthusiastically and adoringly of the General’s appearance: “a mouth utterly
unequaled,” “voice of surpassing clearness, melody, strength.” In glorifying the
General, he speaks of him in pieces, fetishizing each piece. He recounts and details
the General’s perfection, one body part, one feature at a time. The General is never
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whole, not even in his glorified image. The narrator carefully examines his entire
appearance; his body and his voice are dissected as they are presented to the reader.
The narrator makes note that he has “never heard a stronger or clearer voice, nor
beheld a finer set of teeth.” The mention of teeth is a premonition that something
isn’t quite right: The mouth and teeth are the animal maw hinting that something is
coming apart or breaking down.
Throughout the text is an excessive use of dashes. The conversation is cut
up, delivered in pieces. Thoughts are broken up. The body of the text is visually
broken apart, or perhaps the dashes are an attempt at suturing something already
broken. The narrator visits a friend of the General’s, Mr. Theodore Sinivate, to
inquire about the General; but as Sinivate speaks, his words break apart: “Kickap-o-
o-os” “despera-a-do” “pro-o-odigies” “ma-a-a-a-n.”
1
Sinivate speaks like a machine
breaking down, his words falling apart, sliding off themselves into fragments. The
machine of language breaks down. The reader is told that the General liked to
comment on the rapid progress of mechanized invention, on the amazing
mechanical age that they live in and the effects of mechanization on social life and
the arts. We find that the text itself manifests as a broken or breaking machine.
Consumed with curiosity about this outsized figure, the narrator decides to
go to the source, making his way to the General’s home and demanding to see him.
He discovers the General in a small bundle, a heap in his bedroom, his voice
between a squeak and a whistle. The scene is Odradekian, creaturely and also in the
home. The narrator feels terror and surprise as he witnesses this scene. He watches
the General perform evolution as he puts his limbs on and names the people who
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made each body part including his teeth and his eyes. His servant Pompey is ordered
to screw in the parts because he can’t assemble himself on his own. He has a
machine placed into his mouth to change his voice since his tongue had been cut out
in battle and his teeth had been knocked in.
What is described is a figure in the process of figuration, of becoming. The
General is the figuration of silence, of the différend, voiceless and speechless,
gathering himself into a new body. He can’t speak of his battles the way he is, he can
only sound an incomprehensible utterance. He can’t witness without transforming
himself, although as he transforms himself into someone understandable,
translatable, legible, his witnessing is mediating and those listening to him are not
witnessing the real, but instead a translation of the real into something that can be
heard, documented and circulated. It is the transformation of the exemplary into the
example. We still can’t witness the horror of trauma, the devastation of the
battlefield. There is a violence toward any attempt to understand, and so it becomes
sanitized as it is reduced from its original horror into language. Language compresses
the horror; silence maintains it. There is violence in understanding, in the very
expectation of understanding. This is why at the Nuremberg Trials, Sutzkever begins
his testimony with silence, by carving out a space to contain the horror that will not
be translated completely into the courtroom and into the archive. The General, in his
unmediated state, is like the muselmann, the product of violence and war unable to
speak or be understood, barely alive.
The General made of himself both a monument and a memorial, a living
remnant, a witness unable to witness except through mediation and translation. He is
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both the triumphant hero as well as the remains of tragic loss. Technology makes
possible the production of a voice out of silence: The General’s body and his voice
are very literally produced as prosthetics. When the narrator goes in search for the
truth of the General, he finds the center of horror, the lacuna of testimony, and for a
moment, witnesses the real. But the General cannot testify without being translated
and reproduced through technology. The real cannot testify.
Poe’s narrator clearly exposes the fetishization of memory from the outset of
the story, a fetishiziation which ends in horror at the realization of what was lost. Is
the future the survival of survival? Is the return of the past as preserved in the
archive a kind of fetish? Perhaps even an archive fetish? The question we are left
with at the end of this story is what is the meaning of this survival: What, if not who,
has survived? Is the survivor the little heap in the bedroom who needs an arsenal of
prosthetics to be recognized as human and to speak, or is the survivor the one who
has been produced by technology and assimilated back into society? Is there space to
hold memory for the General in his unaltered state, or has he been effectively
disappeared, silenced without his “mask,” a mask that allows him a signature and a
face within society. Is it possible to preserve, monumentalize, and memorialize
without being, to some extent, guilty of kitsch and the fetishization of memory?
In order to present a heroic and powerful monument, a strong mythic image,
certain truths and memory must be silenced. This is the scene at play in The Man That
Was Used Up. The General made himself into a monument, a heroic statue of a man,
in order to be witnessed. The truth of his experience and war memory was silenced
because it had no place in the public need for a hero narrative. In the aftermath of
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atrocity, amidst the construction of memorials, there is always the threat of
forgetting. After the Shoah, survivors were in a constant negotiation between silence
and speaking. Their silence, as I propose in this document, is testimony in itself. The
disinterested silence of the world is what first buried their early testimony. After
getting attention in films and museums, in memorials and monuments, there is the
fear that the memory will be buried again, perhaps replaced with another atrocity.
How much room does the cultural conscious have for historical remembering?
Surely this capacity for remembering can’t be measured by the number of
monuments or memorials; in fact, perhaps the reverse is true. In both Europe and
America, the project of constructing monuments and memorials to the Shoah lagged
for decades after the end of the war. This corresponded to a decades-long period of
silence among survivors. The belated establishment of memorials not only preserved
the memory of the event, but it also preserved the silence that followed. They began
to arise largely in the 1970s and 1980s, and even into the 1990s, as if to say to
survivors, “You have been heard,” without the actual hard work of hearing them.
Memorials can serve and have served to preserve silence by covering up and
displacing memory. This chapter explores the possibility that memorials and the
technology of remembering can produce forgetting, can create silences, and
examines several interventions meant to avoid this fate.
Why erect monuments in the first place? In response to what impulse, what
compulsion, do they arise? In the wake of catastrophe, monuments and memorials
have served as markers of memory, as well as spaces for solace and comfort.
Memorials act as mute witnesses to the past. The terms memorials and monuments are
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often used interchangeably, although many scholars have insisted on their difference.
Art historian Arthur Danto writes that monuments are built so that we remember
and memorials are built so that we do not forget.
1
But aren’t remembering and not
forgetting one and the same? Holocaust studies scholar James E. Young addresses
the ways that memorials and monuments often perform the same functions. He
claims that every monument is, to an extent, also a memorial, in the sense that all
monuments mark a moment that has passed in an effort to preserve what or who has
already gone. The question of memorials is a question of the aftermath of trauma.
Memorials, like archives, give us permission to forget insofar as they are entrusted to
preserve memory for us. We are relieved of the burden to never forget. Young
argues this further, “To the extent that we encourage monuments to do our
memory-work for us, we become that much more forgetful. In effect, the initial,
impulse to memorialize events like the Holocaust may actually spring from an
opposite and equal desire to forget them” (Young 4). Traumatic events can
sometimes close off any interest in working through them due to the difficulty of
such work. Arthur Frank writes in The Wounded Storyteller, “One of the most difficult
duties is to listen to the voices that suffer” (Frank 1995:25).
As many scholars have argued, memorials served only to speed up forgetting,
to satisfy cities and communities that they had done enough remembering and could
now move on. One emergent solution to this crisis of forgetting is the rise of
counter-monuments and anti-memorials which conscientiously resist forgetting. One
example of this resistance is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) designed by
architect Maya Lin. Lin has referred to her work as an anti-memorial rather than a
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memorial. Her design won the memorial competition despite the fact that the rules
of the competition explicitly called for a non-political memorial. The black marble of
Lin’s memorial reflects the viewer. You cannot see the memorial without also seeing
yourself.

Any viewing of the memorial cannot be passive, and cannot be consumed as
a fetish object because of the inability to witness it as only itself. The viewer is always
also witnessing oneself. Viet Thanh Nguyen described this memorial as reproducing
the mirror stage, seeing oneself as other and then as self (Nguyen 2016: 55). The
effect of this black mirror is a crisis in a holistic self, reconciling or closing the gap
between self and other, and in between the two, all the names of the dead.
Memorials and monuments that aesthetically blend in with the environment in which
they are constructed threaten too easily to disappear the memory they carry, whereas
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monuments and memorials that clash with their environment or create an aesthetic
dissonance cannot be ignored or forgotten.
Young first coined the term “counter-monuments” to identify a trend among
artists who rejected traditional approaches to monument conception in favor of ones
that question the legitimacy of monuments and provoke the environment they are
placed in. Young notes specifically that German artists are suspicious and critical of
the traditional heroic monument, finding it inappropriate as a Holocaust monument.
Instead these artists opt for “counter-monuments” which hold true to the tenuous
project of memory work in the wake of the Holocaust. Monuments and memorials
are dangerous objects which permit us to forget, as though the work is done for us
and we are freed from the burden of remembering. Counter-monuments insist on
remembering by highlighting the viewer’s role in memory work. Instead of
condensing trauma into a single monument that is aesthetically pleasing and provides
solace, counter-monuments are intentionally unsettling.
In America, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington
D.C. constitutes the official memorial to the Holocaust. The museum stands in place
of a monument as an expansive archive full of documents, testimony, artifacts,
educational programs, and more. It was established in 1993, the same year that the
Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance was established. The delay between the liberation
of the camps and the establishment of memorials in the U.S., despite being the home
of so many survivors, may also magnify the experience that many survivors have
shared about immigrating to the U.S., namely that there was no interest in what they
had survived and what they had to say until decades later.
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Jon Kaen’s 2017 film After Auschwitz highlights the lives of six women who
survived Auschwitz and found their way to the U.S. The survivors all spoke of the
shock they felt once they came to America and found that nobody wanted to hear
their story. America was synonymous with forgetting, and the survivors were urged
to put it behind them and move on. America meant safety and freedom; why hold on
to the past? More surprising than the larger public’s lack of interest in the Holocaust
was the lack of interest within the survivors’ families in America. The film focuses on
the aftermath of liberation, of what happens after survival, and the central theme is
silence. For instance, one of the subjects, survivor Erica Jacoby, recounts sharing her
story of liberation with her family in the U.S. She said her family immediately judged
and shamed her for the behavior of Jews after liberation, such as looting and stealing
food and clothes. She said that there was such a division between understanding, and
so much judgment that it shut her up from wanting to speak again. Fearing reactions
such as these, many survivors did not share their stories with their own children.
Jacoby says that her children understood her story just by sharing a home and
absorbing her silence. For Jacoby, silence is both a burial of testimony and a method
of absorbing and witnessing. Living as a survivor in the U.S. also meant living in
silence, in the silence of survival. Memorials offer one way to absorb silence,
although at a delay, by validating the victims’ experiences and acknowledging it on a
larger and public scale which establishes itself in our collective memory. A memorial
is a visual marker attesting to the fact that survivors have been heard. It can be
argued that memorials attempt to visualize the responsibility of the witness, that
there is a permanent mark of responsibility that the monument bears in perpetuity.
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Geoffrey Hartman has suggested that the reason for the lack of interest in
survivor stories after the Holocaust was the focus on the perpetrators in an effort to
understand how this could have happened; therefore, survivor testimony was
overlooked. This has also been discussed as an ongoing dilemma in Holocaust
representation, where artists and writers are conscientiously focusing on the stories
of the survivors and victims. But many argue that witnessing these representations is
also witnessing and reproducing the spectacle of Nazi violence. This sentiment is
part of what motivated the emergence of counter-monuments and anti-memorials.
As Young noted, it was largely German artists reconciling the dissonance that lies in
the unmistakable linkage between monuments and totalitarianism. Nazism invested
in symbols and monuments as objects of power and loyalty. How then does one read
a monument erected in a place that had so exploited monuments for control and
power in its brutal past? Counter-monuments attempt to remap this dilemma.
One of the most prominent German artists known for his counter-
monuments is Horst Hoheisel. Hoheisel takes a radical approach; for him, the only
possible memorial is in the minds of the viewers, not in the memorial or monument
itself. He acknowledges the limitations of monuments to preserve memory, and
instead relocates the memory work back onto the viewer. Young and Ellen Handler
Spitz both address the monument as substitution for memory and for understanding.
Spitz refers to these monuments as “cultural fetishes, even of cultural perversions”
(Spitz 2005: 419). She claims that Hoheisel’s signature of turning the viewer into the
monument they seek allows him to avoid any fetishizing of his monuments. His
work is meant to ignite memory-work and mourning in the viewer, with the goal of
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insisting the viewer turn inward instead of turning to monuments and memorials for
meaning and answers. Because of this, his works play with notions of erasure and
withdrawal.
In one of Hoheisel’s most radically-conceived counter-monuments, he
submitted a proposal to a 1995 competition for a memorial located in Germany to
the murdered Jews of Europe. He proposed to destroy the Brandenburger Tor
(Brandenburg Gate), which had become a symbol of German power, and scatter the
ash and dust to honor the dead. The ash and dust themselves would constitute the
memorial. This cinders as monument recalls the lines of Celan’s poem “Chymisch,”
All the names, all the co-incin-
erated
names. So much
ash to bless.

Young writes of this proposal, “How better to remember a destroyed people than by
a destroyed monument?” (Young 1997: 853). Hoheisel proposed to make a memorial
into, and out of, cinders. The artist submitted his proposal knowing it will never be
accepted, so that it would be included among all of the proposals, so that it would
be registered, even if it is rejected. Young writes, “He seems to suggest that the
surest engagement with Holocaust memory in Germany may actually lie in its
perpetual irresolution, that only an unfinished memorial process can guarantee the
life of memory. Better a thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions in
Germany than any single ‘final solution’ to Germany’s memorial problem” (Young
1997: 854). Perhaps this is what Hans Frank was talking about in Nuremberg when
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he said Germany’s guilt would persist a thousand years. Cinders and ash as a
memorial in Berlin is perhaps more honest than a finished memorial. The finality of
a memorial attempts to give closure and peace, to allow the city to move on. How
can one have closure or move on after such a rupture? Hoheisel’s proposal is
perhaps the only possible answer to the question of a memorial in Berlin to the
murdered Jews of Europe. The memorial should reflect the memory it bears. The
memory of the Shoah is unbearable; so too should be the memorial. Young rightly
claims that instead of closing the door on the work of memory as so many
memorials produce, the memory of the Shoah should continue to haunt Germany
rather than be reduced to a plaque or monument one can visit in order to remember
a distanced past.
Hoheisel’s proposal was not the only time he targeted the Brandenburg Gats
as a location for mourning and forgetting. In 1997, he unveiled a one-time
installation titled “The Gates of the Germans,” in which he projected “ARBEIT
MACHT FREI” (WORK SETS YOU FREE) onto the Brandenburg Gates. The
installation took place on January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day
and the German national Memorial Day for the victims of the Nazis.

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The ghostly image and eerie projection collapses the past and the present
into a singular event of haunting. The suggestion is that the past is not so far behind
and the remains of Nazi Germany persist even if they are not readily visible. Spitz
writes of Hoheisel’s work, “His art…tends to memorialize not what happened as an
event in itself but, rather, the very process of attempting to forget that event” (Spitz
2005: 423). The continual production of memorials in Germany is perhaps more
about forgetting than remembering. The more monuments in existence, the easier it
is to say that the Holocaust has been reconciled, that Germany has faced its past and
has worked through it. The more monuments there are, the quicker one can be
permitted to move on.
There are two notable approaches to constructing counter-monuments. One
is to create a monument that visually disorients the viewer and refuses to offer a clear
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narrative, and the other is to create monuments which disappear, vanish, and recede
from view.
Prominent among the first category is Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library.
Whiteread’s proposal for Nameless Library was chosen by an international jury to be
the memorial for Austrian Jews who perished in the Shoah. Whiteread’s library is not
a traditional memorial, but a counter-monument placed in the Judenplatz in Vienna.
Simon Wiesenthal, who led the competition for the memorial, stated at the unveiling
of the Nameless Library in 2000, “This monument shouldn’t be beautiful, it must
hurt.” Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, “the incapacity to name is a good symptom of
disturbance” (Barthes 51). The memorial is named in its very namelessness, calling
attention to disturbance and the “hurt” that Wiesenthal emphasized. In this
memorial, absence is made present, and loss is both felt and archived into public
space and memory.
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Whiteread is known by her signature work which forms plaster casts of
interior spaces. Nameless Library is the first of Whiteread’s works that is not directly
cast from an existing room. This dislocation adds to its ghostly nature. It is an
archive without archive, without referent – familiar, yet out of nowhere. There is no
way of entering this space; it is hermetically sealed, even from its original referent.
The inversion of the library places us inside even as we remain radically outside.
There is no point of entry. Elie Wiesel claimed that those who had never been in
Auschwitz would never enter it, and those who had entered would never leave. We
can only know that we do not know.
Adding another layer of memory and memorial, construction on Nameless
Library was delayed because the ruins of a synagogue that was burned in 1421 were
discovered in the Judenplatz. Hundreds of Jews committed suicide in this pogrom by
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staying inside the synagogue, choosing to be burned alive rather than convert. The
remains that were uncovered included parts of the walls, floors, and the bimah. These
remains, surviving fire, attested to a survival that the square had completely
forgotten. The fact that the discovered remains were a surprise attests to the silence
at the center of the square, that a gruesome act of martyrdom was forgotten in the
self-consuming cinders. There was significant pressure to move Whiteread’s
sculpture elsewhere, but Whiteread protested that the memorial would lose
significance and meaning if it was moved. The Judenplatz has a long history of anti-
Semitism, and this memorial brings that history to the surface. The rupture of the
past breaking in called for a suspension in construction that lasted roughly two years.
The resolution to the matter, in an almost Talmudic compromise, was to move the
memorial one meter from its intended location
30

Nameless Library is a memorial constructed on top of another forgotten
memorial: silence atop silence, a landscape impossibly littered with ghosts. It was
built on top of cinders, a monument to cinders, as it erased the remnants of what
was once there. These monuments, memorials, and memory-works raise the question
of whether they exist for the living or for the dead.
Rachel Carley writes, “The memorial’s strategic assemblage of positive and
negative cast elements has been carefully detailed to depict a work of mourning in
perpetuity. It achieves this by cannily responding to its historical site and

30
Abigail Gillman “Cultural Awakening and Historical Forgetting: The Architecture
of Memory in the Jewish Museum of Vienna and in Rachel Whiteread's "Nameless
Library” New German Critique, No. 93, Austrian Writers Confront the Past (Autumn,
2004), pp. 147 Duke University Press
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surrounding context, turning the architecture of the square in upon itself to
foreground Vienna’s disavowal of anti-Semitic persecution since the Middle Ages:
looking to the local and its role as silent witness in order to draw attention to past
atrocities committed on the site” (Carley 24-25). Carley also notes the detail of the
inverted ceiling rose in the memorial which was not a detail found in libraries but
rather one found prominently in many of the bourgeois apartments surrounding the
square. The inverted ceiling rose, which also appears as a hole in the roof, came
under criticism because of its visual association with a gas chamber. This was an
aesthetic detail used by Whiteread to call out the square for its role and responsibility
as silent witnesses.

The silence of the blank is painful, it leaves a mark, one which is archived
into memory. Disappearance is felt; it stays with you, a loss which archives itself into
your being. Whiteread transforms invisible memory and the ghostly into something
corporeal and yet still within the frame of absence. Architectural critic Brian Hatton
eloquently stated of Whiteread’s monument, “The dead are here, it reminds, but their
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names are elsewhere,” perhaps elsewhere in Yad Vashem’s, “Hall of Names.” Nameless
Library, like Mendieta’s work, is named in its very namelessness. The name has a
larger connotation in Judaism, to be without a name, to name. In a sense, the
monument, the memorial without a name, is one without an author, a fatherless
figure with no anchor, no history, a ghost.
Because the spines of the books elude us, it forecloses the possibility of
cataloging them and of producing a number to index the loss. The uniformity of the
memorial is overwhelming. Each book cast is the exact same height, unmistakably a
reference to Nazi aesthetic and sense of order. It also speaks to the Nazi project and
obsession of documentation and recording (Carley 21). It is jarring to see a Nazi
motif repurposed and reimagined for a memorial to its victims, but this choice also
speaks to survival as much as it does to loss.

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Robert Storrs, a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and a juror
for the memorial to Austria’s missing Jews, wrote of Whiteread’s monument,
“Whiteread’s work is the solid shape of an intangible absence – of a gap in a nation’s
identity, and a hollow at a city’s heart. Using an aesthetic language that speaks
simultaneously to tradition and to the future, Whiteread in this way respectfully
symbolizes a world whose irrevocable disappearance can never be wholly grasped by
those who did not experience it, but whose most lasting monuments are the books
written by Austrian Jews before, during and in the aftermath of the catastrophe
brought down on them.”
Whiteread was not the only artist who chose books as the guiding symbol in
a Holocaust memorial. Artist Micha Ullman’s work is just as ghostly and haunting as
Whiteread’s. Ullman’s memorial, The Empty Library is a monument to the site of Nazi
book burning in the Bebelplatz in Berlin. The monument is all white and is located
underground. Visitors can peer down into it through a window in the ground.
Ullman included a plaque as part of his memorial with a quote from Heinrich Heine
which reads, “Where books are burned, so one day will people be burned as well.”

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Through the Heine quote, the counter-monument becomes a memorial to
the victims of the Holocaust. The linkage of lost books to lost bodies is emphasized
as visitors approach the glass to peer down into the memorial. Like Maya Lin’s black
mirror, the window reflects those who look into it. The fact that the memorial is
built underground makes this even clearer as it becomes a burial site.
Among the second type of counter-monument, which recede into
themselves, is Monument Against Fascism by erasure artists Jochen Gerz and Esther
Shalev-Gerz in Harburg-Hamburg. The monument consisted of a large column that
slowly sank into the ground. It was dedicated in 1986, and by 1994 it had completely
disappeared except for its remaining trace as an empty square in the ground and
plaque on the railing that once surrounded the monument. Young states that the
monument was, “not to accept graciously the burden of memory but to drop it at the
town’s feet” (Young 1997:859).

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Receding monuments, like Mendieta’s Siluetas, are not constructed to last.
Rather, they are consciously ephemeral. These are monuments to disappearance, to
the lost. Perhaps this vanishing monument speaks to the impossibility of the project
of memory work. It also speaks to the impossibility of Germany to bear such a
monument, that this closure and peace must also slip from their grasp, from their
very own ground, a ground that has disappeared so many in its mass graves, thereby
swallowing their memory. The memorial isn’t constructed out of disintegrating
material, it doesn’t just vanish - it slowly sinks into its own grave, braced to be
forgotten. This challenges the viewer, watching the disappearance of memory in a
place which had set out to destroy memory. The burden is placed on the viewer to
carry the memory so that it doesn’t die with the monument.

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Recalling the investigation of performance earlier in the project, Peggy
Phelan’s writing seems just as relevant in the context of memorials. Phelan writes, “I
am investigating the possibility that something substantial can be made from the
outline left after the body has disappeared. My hunch is that the affective outline of
what we’ve lost might bring us closer to the bodies we want still to touch than the
restored illustration can. Or the hollow outlines might allow us to understand more
deeply why we long to hold bodies that are gone” (Phelan 3). Phelan’s writing on
performance is heavily invested in the performative capabilities of the trace, as
writing about performance is always necessarily writing about disappearance. But this
idea that the disappeared, or the trace, can bring us closer to the original loss
privileges absence over presence in a way that recovers silence and insists on
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survival. The disappearing column is also the slowly-disappearing bodies of
witnesses, since survivors do not stay around forever
Gerz created a traceless memorial with his students by replacing
cobblestones with new ones engraved with the names and dates of Jewish cemeteries
in Germany which had been destroyed or disappeared. They found over two
thousand. The cobblestones were placed face down, the names and dates hidden, the
act of resurrecting memory then turned in on itself; forgotten, yet sealed in memory.
The students left seventy stones in the square in Saarbrücken. As Gerz made the
clandestine project public, visitors came to the square in search of the memorial.
Young writes, “As the only standing forms in the square, visitors would become the
memorials for which they searched” (Young 1997: 865). Parliament voted to make
Gerz’s project a public memorial and to name the square “Square of the Invisible
Monument.”
Are second and third generations of survivors, and all those who are
inheritors of their familial trauma, also the memorials for which they search? As the
next generation searches for what is lost, how much are they searching for
themselves? Or making of themselves a monument and archive?
By receding from view, by consciously disappearing, these counter-
monuments project memory onto the viewer and the environment; other artists take
a more direct approach. American artist Shimone Attie created a projection-based
installation in Scheunenviertel, Berlin titled, The Writing on the Wall. Attie found
archived photographs of Jewish life in Scheunenviertel and projected the images
onto the present locations of the photographic images in order to return the
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vanished Jews to this place. As it was a temporary installation, it was also a
temporary haunting. He painted the buildings with their own forgotten memory.
Young writes, “Once projected onto the peeling and mottled building facades of this
quarter, these archival images seem less like reflections of light than illuminations of
figures emerging from the shadows. In the doorway projections particularly, former
Jewish residents seem to be stepping out of a third dimension. Some, like the
resident standing in the doorway of Joachimstrasse 2, are caught unaware by both
the original photographer and later by Attie (as well as, it seems, by us)” (Young
1997: 871).
In his book, Attie wrote, “Walking the streets of the city that summer, I felt
myself asking over and over again, Where are all the missing people? What has
become of the Jewish culture and community which had once been at home here? I
felt the presence of this lost community very strongly, even though so few visible
traces of it remained.” Attie felt the silence, the presence of their loss, a palpable
disappearance. Attie’s project returns Jews to the place they vanished from, returns
them without their permission, temporarily, to a site of their own vanishing.
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This installation is the present holding onto the past, making it come back
for us, to heal the present. How much of this is the younger generations needing the
past to be closer, needing to see this memory, needing to heal themselves or find
something for themselves? Is it a fetishization of their own making? Was this
installation for Scheunenviertel, a dilapidated neighborhood in East Berlin, or was it
for Attie himself? His own internal crypt becomes projected, quite literally, outward
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for all to see. These images appear to be a hallucination of the past, the city’s own
conjured dream or nightmare, as repressed memories awaken on its walls.
Michel de Certeau writes of the palimpsestic way we navigate space
according to its ghosts, “It is striking…that the places people live in are like the
presences of diverse absences. What can be seen designates what is no longer there:
‘you see, here there used to be…,’ but it can no longer be seen.” Our mapping and
situatedness of the present is rooted in our memory of the past, of ghosts, of what
was. We are always in relation to this past, and moreover, we are still able to access
what is gone and invisible. Because of this, the past is never gone, our ghosts never
vanished, they are only ever written over by the present. Writing on the Wall is also
about the future: the future of memory and of testimony, and the future of loss. The
past is projected onto the present in order to call into question the future and
accountability for loss. The project is itself a warning, a warning about erasure and
forgetting, about losing sight of loss. Attie insists that, visible or not, these pasts are
still present.
This turn to technology and media in order to reanimate, animate, resurrect
the past into the present seems to anticipate the New Dimensions in Testimony (NDT)
Project. Unlike Attie’s installation and others working in the same vein, NDT seeks
to reanimate prior to loss, in anticipation of loss, to resurrect the object while it is
still present – a haunting that is even more surreal than resurrecting the lost object.
NDT is a project conceived by the Shoah Foundation, home to one of the largest
genocide archives containing over 55,000 testimonies from the Holocaust, the
Armenian Genocide, the Nanjing Massacre, the Rwandan Genocide, the Guatemalan
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Genocide, and most recently, more than 100 testimonies from the Rohingya
Genocide. The project creates interactive holograms of genocide survivor testimony:
Survivors are re-interviewed in a spherical room of 360 degrees of cameras to fully
capture each angle. The purpose of this project is to create a more effective
educational tool through the immersive experience of speaking with a survivor. The
project anticipates a time when there are no longer living survivors to tell their
stories and share their experiences.
These holograms create a mobile memorial. Memorials can be both a name
and a site. They mark a location where people can visit to mourn and remember.
They are remote, accessible in disparate locations, but unlike recorded testimony
viewed behind a screen, holograms share the space of the viewer. The projects
transform the survivors into their own memorials.
NDT is just at its genesis, a new project that is developing its own
technology in order to fulfill the vision of relative seamless interaction with survivors
for the future. The project is anticipates a future loss, namely the loss of the survivor
generation. In an interview at Yad Vashem, Jacques Derrida responded to a question
posed by Dr. Michal Ben-Naftali expressing the sentiment likely fueling the NDT
Project,
Your question about the date, the signature and the generation, lead
me to think, with some horror, that perhaps, in two or three
generations, all this will have been relativized, if not forgotten, and
that the Shoah will find its place as one episode, among so many
others, of the murderous violence within humanity: there have been
other genocides before or after, the Bible is full of horrifying
violence, of nations who destroy one another. So one knows that
perhaps, in the future, this will be, if not erased or forgotten, at least
classed, relativized by being classed… But at the same time, which
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is ambiguous and horrifying, it is the very act of archivizing which
contributes somehow to classification, relativization and forgetting.
Archivization preserves, but it also begins to forget. And it is
possible that one day, and one thinks of this with horror, Yad
Vashem will be considered as just another monument. (8)

With NDT producing holograms, producing the ghostly, so that the
Holocaust does not feel as much in the past, it has also placed it in the past as
something which has transpired and now is being resurrected, as something that we
have already forgotten and by which we are now being haunted. The project,
intended for the future, may very well achieve its intended legacy. However, at this
moment, while survivors are still alive and still speaking to audiences and sharing
their testimony, there is a striking dissonance between the desire to preserve
testimony before the survivors are gone, and the act of constructing, with their help,
their ghostly doubles that will survive them.

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The encounter with the hologram is uncanny. They appear more life-like
than one would expect. So much so, that in several educational demonstrations with
children, which included both the survivor and their hologram, the children directed
the majority of their questions to the hologram. This scene might serve to better
understand the larger question of why we invest more in the supplement than the
original.
In this project, the present necessarily eludes us. We see it in relation to its
own impending disappearance and consequently, our own loss of this archive. We
restore to us what we fear we will lose. Attie restores what he felt was forgotten, but
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still present, even as nothing more than a haunting. We are projecting before us the
memory of figures who are still very much alive.
The burden of memory is so great that we have kept the survivors “alive” so
to speak, so that we do not have to speak for them or remember for them. The task
is too great, the stakes too high. Surely this speaks to a collective melancholia at work
in this generation of post-memory that Marianne Hirsch has so poignantly discussed.
We can’t name what we’ve lost but we can name the burden we carry in “never
forget.” Are we so melancholic in the sense that we find ourselves incapable of
remembering, unable to preserve the memory of the Shoah and the survivors of
genocide? Are we so melancholic that we can’t undertake this task without a
prosthetic, or assistance from the outside because we are unable? Is this the source
of the haunting? We do not know what it is we have lost; in fact, the survivors are
still alive. We are anticipating a loss, although we do not know what we will be
losing; we fear it is more than the survivors, but the memory itself. And we are
burdened with our deficiency to undertake this project, to remember them, to ensure
the survival of their memory. So instead we ensure the survival of their ghosts to
haunt us and remind us of what we cannot do, and where we have failed. Moreover,
we involve the survivors in the construction of their own phantom. They help us
build their ghosts for us.
Is the melancholic generation that has inherited the trauma of survivors and
the burden of remembering after they’ve gone in fact resentful that the survivors will
die? Archive fever arises out of our distrust in ourselves. We have created recorded
and written testimony, we have cinema, photography, literature, and it is not enough.
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The video testimony came later, in the 1970s and 80s, and that is still insufficient.
The only logical next step to absolute preservation of memory is the ghost, a promise
of haunting so that we will never forget. The restlessness of the ghost keeps one
from forgetting as it cannot be assimilated or incorporated. The current holograms
are still attached to their hosts, to the living survivors who will be survived by their
own approved specters, a signature with a body and a voice. When viewing video
testimony, one cannot help but assume the role of a researcher; there is a screen
which separates the space between the survivor/interviewee and the viewer. With the
hologram, you are immersed in the same space as the survivor; you share a space
with the ghosts. We are accustomed to resurrecting ghosts as we find them in
literature, in cinema, and so forth, but in this case, we are placed before them, placed
with them, without summoning. We have melancholia, it would seem, in advance. In
Abraham and Torok’s, The Shell and the Kernel, they argue, “The dead do not return,
but their lives’ unfinished business is consciously handed down to their
descendants… The phantom represents the interpersonal and transgenerational
consequences of silence” (N. Rand in Abraham & Torok, 1994, pp.166-167).
What kind of fetishization is this, to turn the present into its own haunting,
living survivors into their own disappeared reanimations? Naturally, this dissonance
will lift once the survivors participating in this project have passed away. It is this
current tenuous and uncertain moment of merging the living with the not-yet-dead
into a virtual resurrection of life that produces the dissonance. The lasting legacy of
this project for future generations will likely be an invaluable tool of education and
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preservation of memory. The current stage, however, is an eerie preoccupation with
placing the future loss of the living into their own living monument or memorial.
The holographic reanimation of the dead is an established trope in our
culture: The virtual message from the dead carries one of two meanings; either it is a
request for action on the part of the living who receives the message, or it is a voice
of comfort to the living. Can these holograms be purely tools for education? Are
they not already charged with politics and memory and more than the technology
itself is equipped to deliver? We are accustomed to the trope in cinema and television
of video recordings and holograms projecting with the familiar opening line, “If
you’re seeing this, I’m already dead.” We are seeing this, but the speaker in the
hologram is not dead. It abstracts death by making ghosts of the living.
31

Speaking with ghosts is nothing new for literature scholars who are always, to
some extent, in conversation with the dead. Confrontation with the specter is
something wholly other. When viewing recorded testimony, there is a sense of
distance. No matter how effective the experience of witnessing may be, there is still
an awareness of the screen, and a sense that this is in the past. The hologram appears
as an apparition, a ghost seated in a chair, disarming and jarring simultaneously.
Memorials reside somewhere between object and living memory. As Young

31
I am also considering what can be read as a fetishization of memory. We have
witnessed the death of the book and bookstores due to online bookstores and digital
books, largely attributed to Amazon. Amazon, themselves responsible for this death,
have recently opened their own Amazon bookstores. These stores return the lost
object as a fetish object. Holograms are a kind of fetish, a fetishization of mourning
and of the memory we can never forget.

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and Hoheisel have so eloquently articulated, memorials are meant to evoke memory
just as much as they are expected to archive memory. What have we done when we
have made a memorial out of the living? We are now able to carry our ghosts with
us, and they can continue to comfort us. But do the holograms follow the logic of
the memorial that Young has stressed, in that they relieve us of the burden of
memory? Genocide requires its own archive fever in order to remember, especially as
this documentation is a response to an attempted obliteration of a people. By
creating a way for survivors to testify in perpetuity, we no longer must bear the
burden of “never forget.”
Not to mention the unmistakable phonic echo of the holo, Holocaust,
hologram. The etymology for both words is from Greek: Holocaust derives from the
roots hólos, “whole”, and kaustós, “burning.” Hologram derives from the same hólos,
“whole” and grammé, “letter.” Holography connotes hólos and graphos “writing” (whole
writing). Are these words not the foil of one another? Is the hologram not the
promise manifested after the Holocaust? What has been burned wholly has come
back as whole image, a return of the specter to its rightful place.
In his Yad Vashem interview, Derrida argues that the Holocaust doesn’t
necessarily need to be named when discussing survivors in his text, Survivre, because
everyone already associates “survivors” with survivors of the Shoah. It is impossible
not to make this connection: “each time survivors are mentioned today, this is what
one thinks of” (21). But is this still true today, 20 years later? “Survivors” has come
to mean survivors of sexual assault, at least in the contemporary American context.
And in the context of genocide, which genocide? There are so many survivors, so many
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still surviving. Survival is ongoing. Does this mean that we need to name, we must
name, otherwise the concept attaches itself or gets associated with the current
context and frame of reference - for how could it not? “Survivors” won’t
automatically mean “the Shoah” forever. And then what is the task? Do we ensure
that it continues to mean Shoah, and that the name of Auschwitz is evoked again and
again? That it survives? Survives itself? Jàbes’s Book of Questions follows this logic. It
never names Auschwitz, never names the Holocaust, and yet we cannot read it as
anything but a text on Auschwitz. Auschwitz is the silence at the center of the text, a
screaming silence.
NDT is a post counter-monument, wherein it has internalized the work
proposed by counter-monuments, internalized the crypt, and projected it back out.
We need to witness our own haunting and want it to be visible. Memorials are set on
bringing memory to the surface, counter-monuments are set on burying it, so there is
nowhere to go from there except resurrection and haunting. Like Narcissus who is
fascinated with his own autoamputated image cast outside of him, we are fascinated
by our own internalized phantom cast outside of us. This new Narcissus is not
obsessed with the duplication of his image outside of him, but rather, with the
duplication and externalization of the crypt he carries and the burden of memory.
When thinking through this technology which creates scenes of interactive
conversation between two speakers, one grounded in physical space and the other
projected through a screen or hologram, it seems impossible not to resort to the lens
of cinema. The 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report (directed by Shoah Foundation
founder Stephen Spielberg) tells the futuristic story of a time when there are no
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longer crimes because they can be predicted and prevented. Tom Cruise plays John
Anderton, chief of “PreCrime,” the division charged with stopping would-be
criminals before they can carry out their crimes. In his private life, we learn,
Anderton goes home and speaks with his murdered son through holographic
recordings. He rehearses and reenacts previously embodied exchanges, performing
his memory of his son over and over, so that he doesn’t forget. The hologram lets
him hold on to his ghost.
Even prior to Minority Report, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983)
addressed the threat of absolute loss, the silence of oblivion, and the task of
resurrecting the dead. The film depicts Max Renn, the president of a television
network, who, after being shown an episode of the television show Videodrome,
begins having intense hallucinations, and develops an obsession with the show’s
creator, Professor Brian O’Blivion. As scholars of media, we are haunted by
Videodrome. Media studies is always in crisis, each current moment perceived as a
radical shift towards something new as our lived reality continues to change.
O’Blivion’s character is based on Marshall McLuhan, Cronenberg’s teacher, and
because of this we might read Videodrome as a eulogy or memorial to McLuhan,
where both O’Blivion and McLuhan are the lost father that continues to speak to us
after he’s gone. Videodrome is about the penetration into the conscious by the
unconscious, a folding of the two so that one lives one’s hallucinations and fantasies
as they fold in and out, appear and disappear.
Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the cameraman as surgeon in “The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is a further investigation into the
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cinematic cut. He writes about the camera as constructing a new body where the
cameraman acts as a surgeon and the camera as a surgical tool which penetrates into
the body of the actor and dissects him only to reassemble him as a new body to be
received in film. Barthes also writes about making another body for oneself in the act
of posing, awareness of the camera as medium alters the body, become conscious of
a need to change the body, to submit, to “open up” to the medium, to the camera
eye, the lens which penetrates into your body. What cuts the body is what survives,
what’s archived, and what’s remembered. The body is being cut open at a time when
media itself could be cut open and inspected and when film could be ripped out of
the body of the VHS. We have a different experience with bodies now that our
media experience is different and more distanced. We have spectral relation with
body, one that is dispersed along a series of networks and we go on to the network
to locate ourselves. Brian O’Blivion is much closer to how we operate now, as
monologues on a network in isolation. If media studies addresses media buried in
media or bodies in crypts, and if we’ve lost the body, what’s in our crypts? There is a
logic of media to continue forming crypts, an impulse or drive to encrypt; but what is
being preserved?
This theme of the crypt, of encryption and in a sense, burial as well, is not
only at the heart of Videodrome but also the whole of media studies. This seems to
echo McLuhan’s statement that the content of every medium is another medium.
O’Blivion will only appear on television through television, the medium within the
medium. Media studies is a study of encryption, of excavating the medium buried
within another medium. The pivotal moment in the film occurs when Bianca
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O’Blivion takes Renn to see her father and shows him “all that’s left of him” which
is a video archive. The body of the father in Videdrome is the archive. His body
becomes synonymous with his “body of work.” Where does the body end? Where
does the crypt form? How does one mourn this body, this archive?
Videodrome performs Freud’s screen memories, where the screen of the
television becomes the screen of the unconscious. Renn returns to the same scene
on television that’s projected from his unconscious. He changes the memory slightly
each time, but continues to return and repeat this scene. It’s a memory that is not his
own, one that he’s witnessed and then internalized or absorbed into his own
memory, the memory of another’s experience that he has witnessed. In contrast to
the ghost of Hamlet’s father, which is active, commanding, demanding and
demanding, the ghost of O’Blivion is controlled by his daughter who is the keeper of
his archive and his tapes. Can this techno ghost produce a legible demand? What
does this mean for the ghost in the media age? It is as though Cronenberg is
speaking with his teacher’s ghost; the feedback loops are McLuhan’s body of work,
repeating his teaching.
Oblivion is at the center of the film as both a proper name and as a threat, a
warning, a vortex against and through which the narrative unfolds. Oblivion, like
Cinders, is both a proper name and the total erasure of the name. In the film, the
tools for memory, the technology we desire to extend ourselves, transforms the body
into something else. This project has focused on the ways that silence alerts us to the
edges of things, the edges of language and discourse, but not every edge is a border:
in Videodrome the edge becomes a fold. There is silence at every scene when Renn
166
fuses with technology, captivated as Narcisssus before his reflection. The slow
process of feminization of the main character, who is stereotypically heterosexual,
opens onto the various Deleuzian foldings which navigate this film. Renn’s stomach
opens into a vaginal portal, at first to take in the VHS and later to take in a gun. Is
this not a matrixial borderspace? Renn’s obsession with finding Brian O’Blivion is
then also an obsession with find this tomb, this mausoleum. Videodrome is
consumed and in turn, consumes the viewer. In both Minority Report and Videodrome,
the dead respond to the questions of the living through the mediation of technology.
Max Renn is much like the narrator in “The Man that was Used Up”, he is
fascinated and transfixed by an illusion, and going in search of the center, the father,
and he finds cinders. Just as the fragilization and fragmentation of the General’s
body ripples throughout the text in its very construction, a battlefield of language
wounded, Videodrome too ripples throughout the film in its alterations of Renn’s
body and psyche narrating the film. The body and narration begin to warp, the
border between reality and hallucination collapses and in both stories, we end with a
new conception of the body. Is the General’s techno-appended body not in fact the
new flesh? The body in both of these stories is authored by others, authored by
technology, a traumatropic regime as a crisis in the body signals a crisis in the body
of the archive.
In Poe’s The Man That Was Used Up, we can read the General as a monument
and the unappended and unassembled self as a counter-monument. The narrator’s
obsessive search for meaning and understanding is an equally obsessive search for
memory. He turns to the General for answers, for meaning, for truth, and what he
167
finds is displaced. What he came to learn is turned in on itself, and he becomes the
witness. He comes upon the counter-monument and found something else,
something that made him turn inward. The narrator is conscious of a deceit in the
monument, that there is something lacking or unsettled in its representation. The
little heap where the General begins and ends each day is what gets silenced out of
history. These are the images we must confront if we are to not lose them. Poe’s text
performs the breakdown of memory and the need for the supplement to establish
the original. It is the crisis of an archive and of representation.
What if we push the logic of memorials and archive to the point of folding?
To place an object in an archive in order to remember it is to consign it to oblivion;
to erect a memorial so that we will never forget is to relieve ourselves of the
obligation to never forget; but what are we forgetting, what are we consigning to
oblivion, if not ourselves? To forget is death, the forgetting of forgetting, cinders, a
form of oblivion. When we place something in an archive, museum, or memorial, we
decide it is both invaluable and also expendable. In Videodrome, the linking the body
of the viewer to the body of the medium, death for death, fate for fate, literalizes the
responsibility of the viewer, the spectator, the one who remembers, who still does
not remember, but remembers this, still. If the archival objects are extended outside
of us, removed from our own consciousness and memory which cannot be trusted
to preserve, and placed outside ourselves where it is safe to be forgotten, is this not a
marked grave? Archives contain the logic of their own destruction with you. You are
the end of memory.
168
CONCLUSION: IN AN ARCHIVE OF SHADOWS

The burden of memory, of “never forget,” of “break the silence,” is so great
that we extend it outside of ourselves and into an external body or medium. Plato
memorialized Socrates in Phaedrus while also entombing him to be forgotten. Silence
remains in tension with the anxiety of loss. The burden of remembering the other, of
responsibility, is what prompted Hamlet to write down the message of his father’s
ghost who demands, “Remember me.” Hamlet wrote down his words so he didn’t
forget, but in writing it, he had already forgotten, consigning the ghost to oblivion.
In piecing together early Holocaust memory, I find myself questioning why
certain testimonies, documents, and archives become memory while others do not.
David Boder was the first to record survivor testimony in 1946, and yet his name
and respective testimonies are not present in our memory. Boder’s wire recordings
allowed survivors to speak and to be recorded in their own native language. This was
perhaps the first thing lost in the construction of Holocaust memory at Nuremberg,
because survivors had to testify in the language of the interviewer or the translator,
which often meant they couldn’t testify in their mother tongue. Boder interviewed
non-Jews as well as Jews from Eastern and Western Europe in one of the most
varied interview projects, I Did Not Interview the Dead. Why didn’t Boder become a
memory? We understand, or have placed much on post-memory, but less on what I
am terming pre-memory. I hesitate to call it memory as it was testimony and
documentation before the term “genocide” was coined by Rafael Lemkin, and before
a court and legal proceedings would begin to process what would become Holocaust
memory. What do we do with this pre-memory, this uncategorized experience and
169
documentation, and why did it take so much time to become memory? Even once
memory had been constructed, why did these early testimonies fall through the
cracks? How are Boder’s works not widely known, at least in the circles of Holocaust
studies? Early memory, in modernist and traumatic style, was constructed in pieces.
Whereas post-memory is something inherited and absorbed, the pieces have
somehow been sutured over time into another translation of memory. This project
could very easily fall under translation studies as much as memory or trauma studies.
What do we make of memory that has not been processed or assimilated;
translated? Has it become memory or is it yet to become memory? And might this
gap, this early crisis of lost memory and lost archive somehow have resurfaced in our
current crisis, facing the loss of survivors? If we had from the start a cohesive
memory of the Holocuast, might we forgo hologram technology as a preemptive
exclusion of any further loss? Technology has always been involved in this process of
memory construction, from recorded testimony to photographic documentation,
video footage, and video testimony. Construction of traumatic narratives will
necessarily produce gaps. Have we neglected these gaps,? And if so, what are the
attendant risks? What are the interventions?
What can early memory or pre-memory reveal about our continued struggle
today? With the emergence of more memorials, archives, documentaries, museums,
etc., it would suggest we are still trying to remember, that we have not yet
remembered. But how much memory is enough? Might these missing archives fill
some nagging feeling that we must rescue more memory, that we must preserve, that
we must never forget? What’s more, have we already forgotten to remember? We are
170
still struggling to understand what exactly we’ve lost, still face melancholia rather
than mourning. Are we perhaps suffering the belated effects of memory repression?
Because we forgot to remember, we're facing our own crisis, feeling the burden of
never forget, because at one point in the early stage of this process, we forgot. We
consigned generations of survivors to silence. And we forgot Boder.
What we have forgotten to remember will always come back. With the
#MeToo movement as well as the early Holocaust archives, rape is further
pressed into silence. With Holocaust testimony, it was easier to name and
respond to crimes of murder and torture than it was crimes of sexual violence.
This has shifted in contemporary genocide testimony. With the genocide of the
Tutsi in Rwanda, the Maya in Guatemala, and the Yazidis in Iraq, the reality of
rape is spoken out loud and without shame by survivors. But this wasn’t the
case with the Holocaust. This is why rape was left out of the list of crimes
against humanity in the Nuremberg Tribunal. It wasn’t easy to prosecute, it
wasn’t clear enough, it was too emotional, and it relied too much on survivor
testimony which the trial made an active effort to limit.
With the #MeToo movement as a catalyst, today’s dominant public
dialogue has been about sexual harassment, about very real and destructively
egregious abuses of power by men through tactics that include intimidation,
fear, verbal, and physical harassment. These abuses of power over individuals
who are powerless or made to be powerless has become the focus of
mainstream conversation. To deny or fail to recognize the humanity of those
harassed through acts of objectification has long been common practice, and the
171
roots of this long-established system are just now being dug up. But because
harassment has become the critical focus, rape has been pushed aside, again
peripheral, in the margins. Nearly every woman and certainly many men have
either been harassed or have witnessed harassment. It is easy to identify with
these stories and easy to find similarities with one’s own experiences; it easy to
say, “me too.” There is a resistance to identify with a rape survivor or victim.
This we want to avoid; we want to sympathize, to empathize, but not to identify,
not to admit, “me too”. The rape victim is the muselmann of the #MeToo
movement, the necessary and unavoidable center, the complete witness to the
heart of horror, and also the one who cannot speak. But is it that they cannot
speak, or that they cannot be heard? So many stories address the reality that
what they survived was horrible and emotionally painful, but at least it wasn’t rape,
at least they didn’t become a muselmanner. This figure throws the concept of
survival into question. Do the muselmanner survive, or does the survivor have
to come out of the state of the muselmann to survive?
Could art, and particularly performance, be the answer to this bind? Rebecca
Schneider shows not only how performance is an act of remaining, but also how we
can read archival documents as performative to get access to those live moments
which are lost. She refers to images of atrocity as “durational events,” meaning that
we must continue to look at them and never put them away (Schneider 140). Images
and representations of atrocity must be remembered, each act of looking is also a re-
event of that violence. We have a complicity in looking at these images and when we
do, they become ongoing events that escape the threat of silence. Repetition is
172
significant in all of these pieces as well as the demands they place on the viewer.
Mendieta’s work was invested in the ritual of a series and of repetition and returning.
Sulkowicz’s piece was part of her daily routine, and was therefore performed
everyday for nearly three years until she graduated from Columbia, and even then,
she carried her mattress with the help of several classmates, to receive her degree.
Oxford’s movement resulted in millions of responses, some from the same people,
confessing to numerous experiences of assault. The New York magazine cover was
widely disseminated, printed and online, was visible everywhere. Traumatic narrative
itself is one of endless returning to a wound that has not healed and cannot heal.
Shame arises from carrying this wound. These works all address the necessity and
importance of returning, returning to look, and returning to witness.
But what happens when we can’t agree where to return, or when returning is
deemed “too triggering”? In the wake of the rape of Emily Doe at Stanford
University by student Brock Turner, and the fallout of a trial and sentencing that
failed to deliver justice to the victim, Stanford has decided to turn the site of Doe’s
assault into a memorial garden. In addition to the garden, the university planned to
include a plaque with a quote from Doe’s powerful and widely circulated victim
impact statement which she read at the trial. This gesture toward reconciliation and
recovery has become a contested and contentious dialogue over the appropriate
selection of words for the plaque. Emily Doe selected a quote which her
representative shared with the committee:
You made me a victim. In newspapers my name was “unconscious
intoxicated woman,” ten syllables, and nothing more than that. For a while, I
believed that that was all I was. I had to force myself to relearn my real name,
173
my identity. To relearn that this is not all that I am. That I am not just a
drunk victim at a frat party found behind a dumpster, while you are the All-
American swimmer at a top university, innocent until proven guilty, with so
much at stake. I am a human being who has been irreversibly hurt, my life
was put on hold for over a year, waiting to figure out if I was worth
something.

Stanford decided it was too triggering after consulting with sexual assault counselors
and requested a second choice. Doe sent another quote:
You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my
intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.

The committee concluded that this too was triggering and did not fit with the
peaceful and hopeful sentiment of the memorial garden which was intended to be a
safe and reflective space. Stanford in turn, selected three possible quotes, all of which
Doe rejected:
I’m right here, I’m okay, everything’s okay, I’m right here.

You are beautiful, you are to be valued, respected, undeniably, every minute
of every day, you are powerful and nobody can take that away from you.

On nights when you feel alone, I am with you. When people doubt you or
dismiss you, I am with you. I fought every day for you. So never stop
fighting, I believe you.

Doe is represented by Stanford law Professor Michele Dauber, who has
discussed Doe’s rejection of these quote because she didn’t feel that they were the
legacy that she wanted to leave on her plaque. These quotes, which read on their
own and out of context, do not have a clear association with the assault that took
place, or the purpose of the plaque to mark the memory of what happened. In fact,
the quotes selected by Stanford erase the event altogether; there is no trace in the
design of the memorial, nor in the selected quotes, that a rape ever took place there.
174
For what Provost Persis Drell claims to be a “healing space for survivors,” there is
no trace of survival. It has all been erased, from the crime to the survivor’s voice.
32

University spokesman, Ernest Miranda, commended the university’s selected quotes
as the most appropriate for the nature of the memorial. An article published by
Broadly argued that “the disagreement hinges on how the memorial should function:
a reminder of a horrifying event, or a space for survivors to reflect.” This
disagreement hinges then on the question of memory: Should the memorial in fact
remember what happened? Opting for “survival” over memory, the university has
chosen a memorial which expresses nothing more than the permission they’ve given
themselves to forget.
Because of this deadlocked disagreement, Doe has withdrawn from the
project. She is twice without a name, protected by the anonymity of “Emily Doe”
after her assault and subsequent trial and assault of the justice system, and then again,
in the name of her survival. The remainder, the survival of that site and the crime
scene it once was will become a garden to remember her, but will do so without her.
A memorial plaque without her words: an uncommemoration, an untestament and
untestimony to her survival. This gesture is an attempt to comfort, to give voice to
the voiceless, but is functionally silencing the survivor’s words and experience.
Stanford’s alienating the survivor from the project where she feels she has no other
recourse than to withdraw speaks to the ways in which the narrative of survival is
largely under the control of the same institutions that make it difficult to come

32
https://quadblog.stanford.edu/2018/03/14/on-the-contemplative-garden/
175
forward in the first place. There is an expectation not only of behavior before the
assault, but also during the assault, and of course after the assault. All of these stages
are closely examined for evidence that the victim is not truly a victim. To survive all
of that, to come through all of the horror of a miscarriage of justice, and then to be
denied one’s own language for one’s own commemoration site of one’s own
survival, is madness, is a system broken and self-consumed. Not only is she denied
justice in the present, but she is denied the justice of a future, of a memory, of her
own words of her own choosing. All we have of her is her language, and that
language is not permitted to survive.
It is also alarming that a sexual assault counselor would silence a survivor’s
own words for being “triggering.” This reasoning poses an evacuation of Doe from
the space initially dedicated to her and her trauma. In the United States, we see a
double-edged treatment of survivors; they are either stigmatized or sanctified. Either
way, their narrative is decided for them, and they must fall into the category of bad
example or the model victim. Stanford’s turn against Doe revealed that she was the
good survivor, the sanctified hero, until she failed to continue within their chosen
narrative. By literally choosing her words for a memorial at the site of her own rape,
the university decided how it will be remembered, and how it would live on in the
future. She is denied the future. Can this memorial garden mean without the source
of its meaning?
Doe is already an invisible figure, without a known name, and without a
known face. Stanford furthers her invisibility by refusing to comply with her
requests. Already an absent presence, further abstracted from her own memorial site.
176
She is already haunting the discourse, and now will be sure to haunt this memorial.
She is already a specter; this memorial site was an opportunity to give her a body, but
this too has denied her.
The proposed memorial garden also raises the question of whether a rape
memorial is even possible. A sexual assault awareness group called FORCE:
Upsetting Rape Culture, has been calling for a national rape monument for several
years. In February of 2013, the group installed temporary rape memorials in
Washington D.C. as part of what they call “The Monument Project.” One
installation was located on the steps of the Capitol, while the other is laid over the
reflecting pond to float across the face of the water. The installation took a
marginalized issue and brought it to the nation’s capital for immediate and public
attention and awareness.

177

A statement from the group’s website reads, “FORCE projected ‘RAPE is
RAPE’ onto the US Capitol Building with stories of survivors during the 2012
national election. The stories fell outside of the definition of ‘forcible rape’ and
illuminate what is missing from the national conversation on the politics of rape: the
experience of survivors.” This series of projections calls out our own failures at
registering this trauma and witnessing its victims and survivors. The projections are
178
haunting and impermanent. It would seem that the only possible rape memorial
would be one that continually interrupts, that appears and disappears, because
anything permanent would threaten to bury the events which have already been
buried, and give us permission to move on from what we are just now coming to
terms with on a national scale.

179

We are still coming to terms with the condition of sexual and gendered
violence that so many live with despite movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp.
Can we produce a memorial for what we have still not truly registered, for something
that has yet to become memory? We have still failed to name rape, so how can we
name in a monument what we cannot name? A rape memorial would have to contain
an element of counter-memorial. In Mendieta’s Untitled pieces, there is a resistance to
naming which is also a resistance to finality and closure which leads to forgetting. A
rape memorial must continually interrupt; it must keep the conversation open and
the call for justice ongoing.
What is unsettled, what has failed to be remembered, properly testified or
archived, surfaces as phantom. Despite many efforts and legislations to raise
awareness and achieve justice for victims of sexual violence, it has been a largely
silenced narrative. One could say the opposite about Holocaust testimony: that it has
180
been well documented, that there are vast archives of recorded and written
testimony, numerous films, memorials, and museums. So why has the “never forget”
project resorted to the construction of ghosts, resurrecting the present for the future
as though it was already past?
Can we conceive of the #MeToo movement as a kind of living and
performative memorial? It seeks to continually address the wrongs of the past that
have been covered up and silenced. It is also building its own archive as the hashtag
itself has become a site of remembering, of never forget, a visible marker that
acknowledges the trauma of victims and survivors.
If, as we have considered, monuments and counter-monuments are both,
albeit in very different ways, two projects that produce forgetting or displace
memory, is there a way out of this? Is the ghost the only way out? Perhaps the
absence of Emily Doe at the Stanford Memorial is the surest way to insist on her
presence and the memory of her assault. Knowing what we do now about memorials
and monuments, why would we want to build a rape memorial in the United States?
Why would we want to give ourselves the permission to move on? The only way to
keep from moving on, to never forget, is to be haunted, to keep the ghosts alive and
restless, telling their stories and testifying again and again. The next generations will
inherit these ghosts. Perhaps that haunting is in fact the best possible memorial.

181
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The poetics of reemergence: psetry, subjectivity, and political violence in the neoliberal age

Asset Metadata

Creator Mizrahi, Erin Brooke (author)

Core Title Witnessing silence: testimony, performance, and the poetics of the unspeakable

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture (Comparative Media and Culture)

Publication Date 12/12/2018

Defense Date 08/29/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag archive,Gender Studies,holocaust,memory,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance art,Poetry,sexual violence,Silence,testimony,trauma,visual culture

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Krakus, Anna (committee member), Norindr, Panivong (committee member)

Creator Email ebmizrah@usc.edu,erin.mizrahi@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-113727

Unique identifier UC11676900

Identifier etd-MizrahiEri-7012.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-113727 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-MizrahiEri-7012.pdf

Dmrecord 113727

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Mizrahi, Erin Brooke

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA